The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project, later known as the Stanford AI Lab or SAIL, was created by Prof. John McCarthy shortly after his arrival at Stanford on 1962. As a faculty member in the Computer Science Division of the Mathematics Department, McCarthy began supervising research in artificial intelligence and timesharing systems with a few students. From this small start, McCarthy built a large and active research organization involving many other faculty and research projects as well as his own. There is no single theme to the SAIL memos. They cannot be easily categorized because they show a diversity of interests, resulting from the diversity of investigators and projects. Nevertheless, there are some important dimensions to the research that took place in the AI Lab that will try to put in historical context in this brief introduction.

While some proposals for supercomputers increase the powers of existing machines like CDC and Cray supercomputers, others suggest radical changes of architecture to speed up non-traditional operations such as logical inference in PROLOG, recognition/ action in production systems, or message passing. We examine the case of parallel PROLOG to identify several related computations which subsume those of parallel PROLOG, but which have much wider interest, and which may have roughly the same difficulty of mechanization. Similar considerations apply to some other proposed architectures as well, raising the possibility that current efforts may be limiting their aims unnecessarily.

In keeping with a desire to abstract general principles in AI, this article begins to examine some relationships among heuristic learning in search, classification of utility, properties of certain structures, measurement of acquired knowledge, and efficiency of associated learning. In the process, a simple definition is given for conceptual knowledge, considered as information compression. The discussion concludes that domain-specific conceptual knowledge can be acquired. Among other implications of the analysis is that statistical observation of probabilities can result in the equivalent of planning, in low susceptibility to error, and in efficient learning.

Artificial Intelligence, as a maturing scientific/engineering discipline, is beginning to find its niche among the variety of subjects that are relevant to intelligent, perceptive behavior. A view of AI is presented that is based on a declarative representation of knowledge with semantic attachments to problem-specific procedures and data structures. Several important challenges to this view are briefly discussed. It is argued that research in the field would be stimulated by a project to develop a computer individual that would have a continuing existence in time.

Pierre Bierre Project's proclaimed goals is one vitally important in Clairvoyant Systems a 1990's knowledge-intensive society.....the ability to help A decade from now, the nation will be crisscrossed with fiberoptic bundles capable of simultaneously carrying thousands of hiresolution video conversations, and solid-state video cameras will be as abundant as microphone pickup devices are today. Dear Editor: In short, the voice-telephone and printed-page information One of the sections I most look forward to in each new networks over which we communicate will be joined by 2-issue of the AI Magazine is the one entitled "Research in way, super-narrowcast video, where each knowledge worker Progress." I like to see informative overviews of the research both receives product from myriad sources ad reshapes and being conducted in different AI centers. I am sure there is some justification and teaching. Already, one can "walk through" for this concentration, but I am inclined to believe there are ' homes for sale thousands of miles away, learn how to assemble, other institutions that have, unfortunately, remained relatively operate and fix complex machinery, drive around What makes video I am concerned about this situation for one major reason.

Review of "The Fifth Generation

Early this year fifty people took an experimental course at Xerox PARC on knowledge programming in Loops. During the course, they extended and debugged small knowledge systems in a simulated economics domain called Truckin. Everyone learned how to use the environment Loops, formulated the knowledge for their own program, and represented it in Loops. The punchline to this story is that almost everyone learned enough about Loops to complete a small knowledge system in only three days.

This report covers two main AI areas: natural language processing and expert systems. The discussion of each area includes an assessment of the state-of-the-art, an enumeration of problems areas and opportunities, recommendations for the next 5-10 years, and an assessment of the resources required to carry them out.

Cooperative distributed problem solving networks are distributed networks of semi-autonomous processing nodes that work together to solve a single problem. The Distributed Vehicle Monitoring Testbed is a flexible and fully-instrumented research tool for empirically evaluating alternative designs for these networks. The testbed simulates a class of a distributed knowledge-based problem solving systems operating on an abstracted version of a vehicle monitoring task. it implements a novel generic architecture for distributed problems solving networks that exploits the use of sophisticated local node control and meta-level control to improve global coherence in network problem solving; (2.)