Logic & Formal Reasoning
The Computer Revolution in Philosophy
"Computing can change our ways of thinking about many things, mathematics, biology, engineering, administrative procedures, and many more. But my main concern is that it can change our thinking about ourselves: giving us new models, metaphors, and other thinking tools to aid our efforts to fathom the mysteries of the human mind and heart. The new discipline of Artificial Intelligence is the branch of computing most directly concerned with this revolution. By giving us new, deeper, insights into some of our inner processes, it changes our thinking about ourselves. It therefore changes some of our inner processes, and so changes what we are, like all social, technological and intellectual revolutions." This book, published in 1978 by Harvester Press and Humanities Press, has been out of print for many years, and is now online, produced from a scanned in copy of the original, digitised by OCR software and made available in September 2001. Since then a number of notes and corrections have been added. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Epistemological Problems of Artificial Intelligence
"The epistemological part of Al studies what kinds of facts about the world are available to an observer with given opportunities to observe, how these facts can be represented in the memory of a computer, and what rules permit legitimate conclusions to be drawn from these facts. It leaves aside the heuristic problems of how to search spaces of possibilities and how to match patterns."See also: IJCAI 5, 1038-1044In Readings in Artificial Intelligence, B.L. Webber and N.J. Nilsson (eds.), Tioga Publishing, 1981.
The semantics of predicate logic as a programming language
Sentences in first-order predicate logic can be usefully interpreted as programs. In this paper the operational and fixpoint semantics of predicate logic programs are defined, and the connections with the proof theory and model theory of logic are investigated. It is concluded that operational semantics is a part of proof theory and that fixpoint semantics is a special case of model-theoretic semantics.
Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity
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