The AAAI President's address (the pervious article by Nils Nilsson) presents an eloquent argument for a particular AI paradigm that may be summarized by what Nils calls the "propositional doctrine:" AI is the study of how to acquire and represent knowledge within a logic-like propositional formalism, and the study of how to manipulate this knowledge by use of logical operations and the rule of inference. Although we concur with many of Nil's other assertions, this propositional doctrine seems far to extreme: a lot of interesting and important AI research is done outside of the logic-and theorem- proving paradigm. Indeed, the view that other lines of inquiry serve only to produce tools that may be procedurally attached to an AI (logic-and-theorem-proving ) architecture seems a kind of Logic Imperialism to those of us they wish to relegate to working in the procedure factories. this dismissal of other avenues of research as "not really AI" would normally be cause only for knowing shake of the head and a small chuckle, but when such views are promulgated by the President of the AAAI it is time to take up arms against the logic-and-theorem-proving set -- there is a danger that someone might actually take them seriously! This paper, therefore, constitutes an initial salvo over(into?) their bow. We will focus on two central questions in this rebuttal: What is an appropriate research paradigm for AI? What role should logic-like formal languages and deduction play in the study of AI?

Artificial Intelligence, as a maturing scientific/engineering discipline, is beginning to find its niche among the variety of subjects that are relevant to intelligent, perceptive behavior. A view of AI is presented that is based on a declarative representation of knowledge with semantic attachments to problem-specific procedures and data structures. Several important challenges to this view are briefly discussed. It is argued that research in the field would be stimulated by a project to develop a computer individual that would have a continuing existence in time.

The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project, later known as the Stanford AI Lab or SAIL, was created by Prof. John McCarthy shortly after his arrival at Stanford on 1962. As a faculty member in the Computer Science Division of the Mathematics Department, McCarthy began supervising research in artificial intelligence and timesharing systems with a few students. From this small start, McCarthy built a large and active research organization involving many other faculty and research projects as well as his own. There is no single theme to the SAIL memos. They cannot be easily categorized because they show a diversity of interests, resulting from the diversity of investigators and projects. Nevertheless, there are some important dimensions to the research that took place in the AI Lab that will try to put in historical context in this brief introduction.

IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-32 (9), 785–798

American Mathematical Soceify 29, 1983

I went to a panel on "Education in AI" and stepped back into an argument that I had thought settled several years ago. The debate was between the "scruffies," led by Roger Schank and Ed Feignbaum, and the "neats," led by Nils Nilsson. The neats argued that no education in AI was complete without a strong theoretical component, containing, for instance, courses on predicate logic and automata theory. The scruffies maintained that such a theoretical component was not only unnecessary, but harmful.

A funny thing happened to me at IJCAI-81. I went to a panel on "Education in AI" and stepped back into an argument that I had thought settled several years ago. The debate was between the "scruffies," led by Roger Schank and Ed Feignbaum, and the "neats," led by Nils Nilsson. The neats argued that no education in AI was complete without a strong theoretical component, containing, for instance, courses on predicate logic and automata theory. The scruffies maintained that such a theoretical component was not only unnecessary, but harmful.

This work investigates the use of formal logic as a practical tool for describing the syntax and semantics of a subset of English, and building a computer program to answer data base queries expressed in that subset. To achieve an intimate connection between logical descriptions and computer programs, all the descriptions given are in the definite clause subset of the predicate calculus, which is the basis of the programming language Prolog. The logical descriptions run directly as efficient Prolog programs. Three aspects of the use of logic in natural language analysis are covered: formal representation of syntactic rules by means of a grammar formalism based on logic, extraposition grammars;. formal semantics for the chosen English subset, appropriate for data base queries; informal semantic and pragmatic rules to translate analysed sentences into their formal semantics. On these three aspects, the work improves and extends earlier work by Colmerauer and others, where the use of computational logic in language analysis was first introduced. The University of Edinburgh

PROLOG is a simple and powerful progamming language based on first-order logic. This paper examines two possible extensions to the language which would generally be considered "higher-order".t The first extension introduces lambda expressions and predicate variables so that functions and relations can be treated as 'first class' data objects. We argue that this extension does not add anything to the real power of the language. The other extension concerns the introduction of set expressions to denote the set of all (provable) solutions to some goal. We argue that this extension does indeed fill a real gap in the language, but must be defined with care.In Hayes, J. E., Michie, D., and Pao, Y.-H. (Eds.), Machine Intelligence 10. Ellis Horwood.

Our own early attempts (as devoted users of LISP) to use PROLOG convinced us that it would be worth the effort to create within LISP a faithful implementation of Kowalski's logic programming idea. We felt it would be very convenient to be able to set up a knowledge base of assertions inside a LISP workspace, and to compute the answers to queries simply by executing appropriate function calls.In Hayes, J. E., Michie, D., and Pao, Y.-H. (Eds.), Machine Intelligence 10. Ellis Horwood.