Many of the ideas behind object-oriented programming have roots going back to SIMULA. The first substantial interactive, display-based implementation was the SMALLTALK language. The object-oriented style has often been advocated for simulation programs, systems programming, graphics, and AI programming. The history of ideas has some additional threads including work on message passing as in ACTORS, and multiple inheritance as in FLAVORS. It is also related to a line of work in AI on the theory of frames and their implementation in knowledge representation languages such as KRL, KEE, FRL, and UNITS.

By extending assemble thoery, we obtain a mathematical foundation for representing and reasoning about dynamic systems with continuous object, such as liquids and continuous programs, such as chemical reactions. This facility is embedded into the DREAM representation framework that, using object-oriented mechanisms, integrates a varity of representation approaches.

"One of the biggest problems in AT programming is the difficulty of specifying control. Meta-level architecture is a knowledge engineering approach to coping with this difficulty. The key feature of the architecture is a declarative control language that allows one to write partial specifications of program behavior. This flexibility facilitates incremental system dcvclopment and the integration of disparate architectures like demons, object-oriented programming, and controlled deduction. This paper presents the language, describes an appropriate, and cliscusses the issues of compiling. It illustrales the architecture with a variety of examples and reports some experience in using the architecture in building expert systems."Earlier: M. Genesereth and D.E. Smith. Meta-level Architecture. Memo HPP-81-6, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, 1981.In Proceedings of the AAAI, Washington, DC., August, 1983

Most people enjoy playing games. Most CS-1 students will enjoy a final project that involves computational game-playing. Chance-It is a simple two-person dice game with many possible strategies at varying levels of sophistication and complexity. These features make the problem of formalizing and encoding a strategy to play Chance-It an interesting final project for CS-1.This paper describes an object-oriented final project for CS-1 in which students build Player1 and Player2 classes to play Chance-It. A ChanceItGame class and driver are provided to coordinate the interactions of these classes.