As a minimum we should at least be better able to decide when sentences from a'polyhedral language' or'smooth language' are

The distinction between analytic and empirical statements obviously has some potential philosophical overtones. We hope to avoid most of them by formulating the distinction in terms of an assumption on the verbs believe, know, and so on, rather than in terms of philosophical considerations. The predicate'Holds' The connectedness' of our set of functions and relations requires that there should be some unary relation'Holds' such that Holds(m

The problem we consider in this paper is that of discovering formal rules which will enable us to decide when a question posed in English can be answered on the basis of one or more declarative English sentences. To illustrate how this may be done in very simple cases we give rules which translate certain declarative sentences and questions involving the quantifiers'some', 'every', 'any', and'no' into a modified first-order predicate calculus, and answer the questions by comparing their translated forms with those of the declaratives. We suggest that in order to capture the meanings of more complex sentences it will be necessary to go beyond the first-order predicate calculus, to a notation in which the scope of words other than quantifiers and negations is clearly indicated. We conclude by describing a notational form for connected sentences, which seems to be a natural extension of Chomsky's'deep structures'. INTRODUCTION In this paper we shall consider the problem of when an English sentence, or a series of sentences, provides enough information to answer a question, also posed in English.

We have attempted to discover formal rules for transcribing into musical notation the fugue subjects of the Well-Tempered Clavier, as this might be done by an amanuensis listening to a'dead-pan' performance on the keyboard. In this endeavour two kinds of problem arise: what are the harmonic relations between the notes, and what are the metrical units into which they are grouped? The harmonic problem is that the number of keyboard semitones between two notes does not define-- their harmonic relation, and we further develop an earlier theory of such relations, arriving at an algorithm which assigns every fugue to the right key and correctly notates every accidental in its subject. The metric problem is considered de novo, and a metrical algorithm is described whose failures to generate Bach's notation are as illuminating as its successes. INTRODUCTION The performance of a piece of music involves both the performer and the listener in a problem of interpretation. The performer must discern and express musical relationships which are not fully explicit in the musical score, and the listener must appreciate relationships which are not explicit in the performance. How the performer should convey his interpretation of the piece is an aesthetic question of the utmost delicacy; but the converse process, that of listening to a piece and discerning its structure, is partly amenable to objective investigation. This is because European classical music is written in a notation which conveys to the performer a considerable amount of information about its structure, and this information can be reconstituted by the educated listener from even a mediocre performance. The'correct' annotation of the melody in question is, of course: This gap in musical theory is all the more glaring in view of the considerable effort which has been devoted to much more ambitious undertakings, such as programmed musical composition. We are cynical enough to believe that it is only the prevailing babel in contemporary classical music which saves most of these compositions from being treated with the derision which they merit, and that if any progress is to be made in this direction it will first be essential to formalize the most elementary facts about musical cOmpetence, such as those we have just mentioned.

The Genetics Counselor is a computer program, written in LISP, designed to handle problems of medical genetics counseling. It is an attempt to apply the methods of artificial intelligence research to medical diagnostic problems. The program attempts to map the data space of a family-tree structure into the hypothesis space of classical Mendelian genetics by use of a heuristic search. The input data are the family members along with their children (or parents), and phenotype. The program generates a family tree and searches for consanguinity.

Yet the attention given to the program as an application of artificial intelligence research has tended to obscure the more general concerns of the project investigators.

In order to be able to view the situation objectively we feel that it would be useful to preface this with a historical review of the development of ideas in this twenty-year-old field. By considering the most important ideas and techniques that are employed in the (currently) best program available, we hope to convince the reader that progress has been very slow despite the multiplicity of programs (and their associated literature) which have appeared since 1950. HISTORICAL REVIEW The most important paper that has appeared on the subject of computer chess is one written by Claude Shannon in 1948 and published two years later (Shannon 1950). Shannon's paper does not describe an actual program, but offers many suggestions for those who are interested in writing one. In this respect Shannon's paper may be compared with one by Jack Good which was also full of sound ideas which could well be included in a successful chess program (Good 1967). Shannon stressed the importance of having a good evaluation function. The features which he considers necessary for inclusion in the evaluation function included material, mobility, five aspects of pawn-structure, four of the positions of pieces, and four of commitments of pieces, attacks and options. He appreciated that such an evaluation function should be used only in the middle-game, and that different principles applied to the opening and endgame phases of chess. He suggested that the values of the coefficients of the function should be determined by'some experimental procedure', and the fact that this statement has never been followed in practice is very surprising.

At least we should be able to harness the power of the intelligent machines to tackle their threat to humanity, as now we use machines to counteract ill-effects of other machines. Although ethical notions change with time and across societies, no doubt some notions and restraints are shared by all societies. These could be programmed into the intelligent machines and in this way they could be made to'see' our morality. But as human morality changes, should the morality of the machines be made to follow? More generally, should we build human ethical and other inertias into intelligent machines? It would certainly be intolerable for us to be judged by values accepted in past times; so presumably we should wish the machines to follow our social mores as they change, rather than (like ideal clocks) be perfectly inertial, in the hope of representing ultimate values.

K.A.PATON 411 24 Centromere finding: some shape descriptors for small chromosome outlines.

K.A.PATON 411 24 Centromere finding: some shape descriptors for small chromosome outlines.