After an introduction to LOGO thinking and language, the benefits of children writing simple AI programs using the proper tools were described. Finally, the ways in which an Al system designed for education can interact with children were discussed. These ideas should be implemented and tested with children. Only then will the effects on education be known.

Department of Computer Science University of Western Ontario PART 1 In their book Mathematics and Logic Kac and Ulam (1971) comment: "The point of view as it has evolved through centuries is that one need not know what things are as long as one knows what statements about them one is allowed to make. Hilbert's famous Grundlagen der Geometrie begins with the sentence: 'Let there be three kinds of objects; the objects of the first kind shall be called "points", those of the second kind "lines", and those of third "planes". That is all, except that there follows a list of initial statements (axioms) that involve the words "point', "line" and "plane", and from which other statements involving those undefined words can now be deduced by logic alone. This permits geometry to be taught to a blind man and even to a computer!" Leaving aside the attitude implicit in Kac & Ulam's use of the word'even' in the phrase even to a computer', it has become clear that programs to prove theorems in ...

INTRODUCTION Further progress in the application of computers to many practical fields seems to depend heavily on the success in implementing learning and inductive processes within machines. For example, to develop a consultation system for medical or plant disease diagnosis, prognosis and decision making in general, it is very desirable, perhaps even necessary, to be able to'teach' the system through examples of correct and/or incorrect decisions, rather than by precisely describing the decision process in its full generality and then transforming this description into a computer program. A similar situation exists in computer chess. The development of computer programs playing at the master level (especially the end games) seems to be a formidable task if the programs are not eventually able to learn and improve on their decision making rules through the specific examples of games, rather than by being explicitly told all the rules. Due to easy access to human knowledge about chess and the relative simplicity of testing the results, chess is one of the most attractive testing domains for inductive inference programs. This report presents first results from an experiment on the application of an inductive learning program called AQVAL/1 developed at the University of Illinois, to chess end games.

I. INTRODUCTION Describing scientific theory formation as an information-processing problem suggests breaking the problem into subproblems and searching solution spaces for plausible items in the theory. A computer program called meta-DEN D RAL embodies this approach to the theory formation problem within a specific area of science. Scientific theories are judged partly on how well they explain the observed data, how general their rules are, and how well they are able to predict new events. The meta-D END RA L program attempts to use these criteria, and more, as guides to formulating acceptable theories. The problem for the program is to discover conditional rules of the form S-421, where the S's are descriptions of situations and the A's are descriptions of actions. The rule is interpreted simply as'When the situation S occurs, action A occurs'. The theory formation program first generates plausible A's for theory sentences, then for each A it generates plausible S's. At the end it must integrate the candidate rules with each other and with existing theory. In this paper we are concerned only with the first two tasks: data interpretation (generating plausible A's) and rule formation (generating plausible S's for each A). This paper describes the space of actions (A's), the space of situations (S's) and the criteria of plausibility for both. This requires mentioning some details of the chemical task since the generators and the plausibility criteria gain their effectiveness from knowledge of the task. The theory formation task As in the past, we prefer to develop our ideas in the context of a specific task area.

B.RANDELL 3 PROGRAM PROOF AND MANIPULATION 2 Some techniques for proving correctness of programs which alter data structures.

But the point I wish to make is that we can now calculate many thousands of times as fast as we could in 1953 and at least a million times as fast as we could three hundred years ago. Now this change is quite extraordinary, if one compares it for example with the increase in the speed of travel. A satellite orbiting the earth or moving towards the planets is unlikely to go much faster than twenty-five or thirty thousand miles an hour. An ordinary man can usually do two and a half or three, so that the satellite is perhaps ten thousand times as fast as a walking man. The enormous increase in speed of travel has changed our world and our ideas of the potentially possible. We don't use satellites to go from Manchester to Edinburgh in a few minutes, but we hope to explore the solar system.

B.RANDELL 3 PROGRAM PROOF AND MANIPULATION 2 Some techniques for proving correctness of programs which alter data structures.

Among the many properties ascribed to the magical number seven is that of marking out the significant epochs of a human life-span -- seven years from birth to departure from the kindergarten, another seven to puberty, another seven to majority. The occasion of the Seventh International Machine Intelligence Workshop is perhaps an appropriate moment to take stock. Views differ as to exactly which of the successive thresholds is the one on which machine intelligence research is now poised. But there is no mistaking the sense of transition, felt both by its practitioners, who claim that their field is at last attaining maturity, and in a rather different way by its interested Spectators. The latter rightly point out that if maturation brings opportunity and new powers it also brings the obligation to earn a living.

Oberuc 245, 249 see predicate calculus Occam's razor 271 London 24-5, 52