Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, Vol 7, pp. 102-128

This is the first clear call for the separation of knowledge and inference procedure in AI. In this paper McCarthy advocates using predicate logic as a declarative representation of knowledge and first-order logic as the inference procedure.Additional notes on this landmark paper at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcc59/mcc59.html.Bar-Hilel's comments in the discussion section from the conference are also interesting:"PROF. Y. BAR-HILLEL: Dr. McCarthy's paper belongs in the Journal of Half-Baked Ideas, the creation of which was recently proposed by Dr. I. J. Good. Dr. McCarthy will probably be the first to admit this. Before he goes on to bake his ideas fully, it might be well to give him some advice and raise some objections. He himself mentions some possible objections, but I do not think that he treats them with the full consideration they deserve; there are others he does not mention.For lack of time, I shall not go into the first part of his paper, although I think that it contains a lot of highly unclear philosophical, or pseudo-philosophical assumptions. I shall rather spend my time in commenting on the example he works out in his paper at some length. Before I start, let me voice my protest against the general assumption of Dr. McCarthy -- slightly caricatured -- that a machine, if only its program is specified with a sufficient degree of carelessness, will be able to carry out satisfactory even rather difficult tasks."In Proceedings of the Symposium on the Mechanization of Thought Processes, National Physical Laboratory 1:77-84

'The modern science of switching theory began

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From: Technology Review, November, 62:42-45. See also: Some studies in machine learning using the game of checkers, IBM Journal of Research and Development, 3(3) :210-229, 1959.

This paper briefly reviews the evidence for multistore theories of memory and points out some difficulties with the approach. An alternative framework for human memory research is then outlined in terms of depth or levels of processing. Some current data and arguments are reexamined in the light of this alternative framework and implications for further research considered.

Group Report 54-15, Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lexington, Mass

Teddington Conference

"MANY EFFORTS have been made to discriminate,  categorize, and quantitate patterns, and  to reduce them into a usable machine language.  The results have ordinarily been methods or devices  with a high degree of specificity. For example, some  devices require a special type font; others can read  only one type font; still others require magnetic ink. We have an interest in decision-making circuits  with the following qualities: (1) measurable high reliability  in decision making, (2) either a high or a low  reliability input, and (3) possibly low reliability components.  The high specificity of the devices and  methods mentioned above was felt to be a drawback  for our purposes. All of these approaches prove upon inspection to center upon analysis of the specific  characteristics of patterns into parts, followed by a  synthesis of the whole from the parts. In these  studies, pattern recognition of the whole, that is, Gestalt recognition, was chosen as a more fruitful  avenue of approach and as a satisfactory problem for  the initial phases of the over-all study." Proceedings of the Eastern Joint Computer Conference, pp. 225-232, New York: Association for Computing Machinery