We describe an artificial ant colony capable of solving the travelling salesman problem (TSP). Ants of the artificial colony are able to generate successively shorter feasible tours by using information accumulated in the form of a pheromone trail deposited on the edges of the TSP graph. Computer simulations demonstrate that the artificial ant colony is capable of generating good solutions to both symmetric and asymmetric instances of the TSP. The method is an example, like simulated annealing, neural networks and evolutionary computation, of the successful use of a natural metaphor to design an optimization algorithm.

An antimicrobial therapy consultation system has been developed which utilizes a flexible representation of knowledge. An ability to display reasons for making decisions at the request of the user permits the program to serve a tutorial as well as consultative role. The feasibility of the judgmental rule approach which the program uses has been demonstrated with a limited knowledge base of approximately 100 rules. Its ultimate success as a clinically useful tool depends upon acquisition of additional rules and thus upon co-operation of infectious disease experts willing to improve the program's knowledge base. The techniques for acquisition, representation, and utilization of knowledge, plus considerations of natural language processing, draw upon and contribute to current Artificial Intelligence research.

"A five-year interdisciplinary effort by speech scientists and computer scientists has demonstrated the feasibility of programming a computer system to “understand” connected speech, i.e., translate it into operational form and respond accordingly. An operational system (HARPY) accepts speech from five speakers, interprets a 1000-word vocabulary, and attains 91 percent sentence accuracy. This Steering Committee summary report describes the project history, problem, goals, and results." Amsterdam: North- Holland.

In recent years many attempts have been made to use the computer as an aid to diagnosis, but little has been done to exploit the potential of computer technology as a more general aid to decision making. We describe the use of the discipline of decision analysis as the basis for an experimental interactive computer program designed to assist the physician in the clinical management of acute oliguric renal failure. The program deals with alternative courses of action, either tests or treatments, for which the potential risks or benefits may be large, and it balances the anticipated risk of a given strategy against the anticipated benefit that it offers the patient. The appraisals of the different courses of action open to the physician are expressed in quantitative terms as expected value. The program has been evaluated by comparing its recommendations to those of experienced nephrologists in 18 simulated cases of acute oliguric renal failure.

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The paper describes a system of semantic analysis and generation, programmed in LISP 1.5 and designed to pass from paragraph length input in English to French via an interlingual representation. A wide class of English input forms will be covered, but the vocabulary will initially be restricted to one of a few hundred words. With this subset working, and during the current year (71-72), it is also hoped to map the interlingual representation onto some predicate calculus notation so as to make possible the answering of very simple questions about the translated matter. The specification of the translation system itself is complete, and its main points of interest that distinguish it from other systems are: i) It translated phrase by phrase -- with facilities for reordering phrases and establishing essential semantic connectivities between them -- by mapping complex semantic structures of "message" onto each phrase. These constitute the interlingual representation to be translated.

The advent of computer networks such as the ARPA net (see e.g., Ornstein et al.) has significantly increased the opportunity for access by a single researcher to a variety of different computer facilities and data bases, thus raising expectations of a day when it will be a common occurrence rather than an exception that a scientist will casually undertake to use a computer facility located 3000 miles away and whose languages, formats, and conventions are unknown to him. In this foreseeable future, learning and remembering the number of different languages and conventions that such a scientist would have to know will require significant effort---much greater than that now required to learn the conventions of his local computing center (where other users and knowledgeable assistance is readily available). The Lunar Sciences Natural Language Information System (which we will hereafter refer to as LUNAR) is a research prototype of a system to deal with this and other man-machine communication problems by adapting the machine to the conventions of ordinary natural English rather than requiring the man to adapt to the machine.

In order to represent the conceptual information underlying a natural language sentence, a conceptual structure has been established that uses the basic actor-action-object framework. It was the intent that these structures have only one representation for one meaning, regardless of the semantic form of the sentence being represented. Actions were reduced to their basic parts so as to effect this. It was found that only fourteen basic actions were needed as building blocks by which all verbs can be represented. Each of these actions has a set of actions or states which can be inferred when they are present.

Kenneth Mark Colby, 1920 - 2001 Kenneth Colby was born in Waterbury, Connecticut and graduated from Yale in 1941. Two years later he graduated from Yale's School of Medicine. Colby started his career as a professor of computer science at Stanford, and also did some research for the National Institute of Mental Health. It was there that he created Parry in the university's Artificial Intelligence Library. Parry was a chatterbot, and able to have conversations with people.

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