This is an excerpt from the Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, a compendium of hundreds of articles about AI ideas, techniques, and programs being prepared at Stanford University by AI researchers and students from across the country. In addition to articles describing the specifics of various AI programming methods, the Handbook contains dozens of overview articles like this one, which attempt to give historical and scientific perspective to work in the different areas of AI research. This article is from the Handbook chapter on natural language understanding. Cross-references to other articles in the handbook have been removed-terms discussed in more detail elsewhere are italicized. Many people have contributed to this chapter, including especially Anne Gardner, James Davidson, and Terry Winograd. Avron Barr and Edward A. Feigenbaum are the Handbook's general editors.

International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 11:5-24

"Computing can change our ways of thinking about many things, mathematics, biology, engineering, administrative procedures, and many more. But my main concern is that it can change our thinking about ourselves: giving us new models, metaphors, and other thinking tools to aid our efforts to fathom the mysteries of the human mind and heart. The new discipline of Artificial Intelligence is the branch of computing most directly concerned with this revolution. By giving us new, deeper, insights into some of our inner processes, it changes our thinking about ourselves. It therefore changes some of our inner processes, and so changes what we are, like all social, technological and intellectual revolutions." This book, published in 1978 by Harvester Press and Humanities Press, has been out of print for many years, and is now online, produced from a scanned in copy of the original, digitised by OCR software and made available in September 2001. Since then a number of notes and corrections have been added. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

This text is a description of a computer-based system designed to assist physicians with clinical decision-making. This system, termed MYCIN, utilizes computer techniques derived principally from the subfield of computer science known as artificial intelligence (AI). MYCIN's task is to assist with the decisions involved in the selection of appropriate therapy for patients with infections.

MYCIN contains considerable medical expertise and is also a novel application of computing technology. Thus, this text is addressed both to members of the medical community, who may have limited computer science backgrounds, and to computer scientists with limited knowledge of medical computing and clinical medicine. Some sections of the text may be of greater interest to one community than to the other. A guide to the text follows so that you may select those portions most pertinent to your particular interests and background.

The complete book in a single file.

See also: Education Resources Information CenterSupplement to Proceedings of the IFIP 68 International Congress, Edinburgh, August 1968. Published in A. J. H. Morrell (ed.), Information Processing 68, Vol. II, pp. 1008-1022, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1969.

In Proc. IRIA Symposium on Automatic Demonstration, pp. 276–310.

E.A. Feigenbaum and J. Feldman (Eds.). Computers and Thought. McGraw-Hill, 1963. This collection includes twenty classic papers by such pioneers as A. M. Turing and Marvin Minsky who were behind the pivotal advances in artificially simulating human thought processes with computers. All Parts are available as downloadable pdf files; most individual chapters are also available separately. COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE. A. M. Turing. CHESS-PLAYING PROGRAMS AND THE PROBLEM OF COMPLEXITY. Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw and H.A. Simon. SOME STUDIES IN MACHINE LEARNING USING THE GAME OF CHECKERS. A. L. Samuel. EMPIRICAL EXPLORATIONS WITH THE LOGIC THEORY MACHINE: A CASE STUDY IN HEURISTICS. Allen Newell J.C. Shaw and H.A. Simon. REALIZATION OF A GEOMETRY-THEOREM PROVING MACHINE. H. Gelernter. EMPIRICAL EXPLORATIONS OF THE GEOMETRY-THEOREM PROVING MACHINE. H. Gelernter, J.R. Hansen, and D. W. Loveland. SUMMARY OF A HEURISTIC LINE BALANCING PROCEDURE. Fred M. Tonge. A HEURISTIC PROGRAM THAT SOLVES SYMBOLIC INTEGRATION PROBLEMS IN FRESHMAN CALCULUS. James R. Slagle. BASEBALL: AN AUTOMATIC QUESTION ANSWERER. Green, Bert F. Jr., Alice K. Wolf, Carol Chomsky, and Kenneth Laughery. INFERENTIAL MEMORY AS THE BASIS OF MACHINES WHICH UNDERSTAND NATURAL LANGUAGE. Robert K. Lindsay. PATTERN RECOGNITION BY MACHINE. Oliver G. Selfridge and Ulric Neisser. A PATTERN-RECOGNITION PROGRAM THAT GENERATES, EVALUATES, AND ADJUSTS ITS OWN OPERATORS. Leonard Uhr and Charles Vossler. GPS, A PROGRAM THAT SIMULATES HUMAN THOUGHT. Allen Newell and H.A. Simon. THE SIMULATION OF VERBAL LEARNING BEHAVIOR. Edward A. Feigenbaum. PROGRAMMING A MODEL OF HUMAN CONCEPT FORMULATION. Earl B. Hunt and Carl I. Hovland. SIMULATION OF BEHAVIOR IN THE BINARY CHOICE EXPERIMENT Julian Feldman. A MODEL OF THE TRUST INVESTMENT PROCESS. Geoffrey P. E. Clarkson. A COMPUTER MODEL OF ELEMENTARY SOCIAL BEHAVIOR. John T. Gullahorn and Jeanne E. Gullahorn. TOWARD INTELLIGENT MACHINES. Paul Armer. STEPS TOWARD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Marvin Minsky. A SELECTED DESCRIPTOR-INDEXED BIBLIOGRAPHY TO THE LITERATURE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Marvin Minsky.