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Partial Evaluation, Programming Methodology, and Artificial Intelligence

AI Magazine

This article presents a dual dependency between AI and programming methodologies. AI is an important source of ideas and tools for building sophisticated support facilities which make possible certain programming methodologies. These advanced programming methodologies in turn can have profound effects upon the methodology of AI research. Both of these dependencies are illustrated by the example of anew experimental programming methodology which is based upon current AI ideas about reasoning, representation and control. The manner in which AI systems are designed, developed and tested can be significantly improved in the programming is supported by a sufficiently powerful partial evaluator. In particular, the process of building levels of interpreters and of intertwining generate and test can be partially automated. Finally speculations about a more direct connection between AI and partial evaluation are presented.


Alexander Lerner: A Biographical Sketch

AI Magazine

In 1939, he defended a thesis on a new method of calculating A special session entitled "Future Directions In Artificial He was awarded the title Candidate of Intelligence in Washington, D.C. in August. The session, Technical Sciences by the Moscow Institute of Energetics, chaired by Jack Minker, was held to honor Soviet cyberneticist where he worked as a lecturer until the USSR entered World Alexander Yankelovich Lerner's seventieth birthday. He was then commissioned to work at an iron and Minker described Dr. Lerner's contributions to science. The two years of practical work at the Patrick Winston gave a technical presentation, followed by plant led to his book Construction of Industraal Automatic questions from the audience. Electrzcal Drives, published in 1950, together with E.A. Following the session, 228 attendees signed a letter wishing Rosenman. After the war he was appointed head of the Dr. Lerner a happy birthday, and 233 attendees signed USSR's newly established Central ...


Letters to the Editor

AI Magazine

The second example is of another distinguished scholar who, in a passionate contribution to the debate, stated that ... May I also take this opportunity to praise the staff Western governments, were thereby displaying a full sense of I look forward to the continuing success of the Association social responsibility, and anybody who disagreed with this in all its activities. On the surface this appears Yours sincerely, to be at least logical, until one reflects that it would not Marten E. Bennett be particularly difficult with this kind of argument to prove Gzllingham, Kent, UK that Hitler displayed a sense of social responsiblity, since one has no reason to believe that he was not sincere in believing that Jews, communists, Western capitalists and others would destroy his country if not checked. There is really not much excuse these days for anyone The background to it is the "Marietta affair." University of Cambridge, "Defended to Death," edited by movement protested on the conference site, and after some Gwyn Prins and published by Penguin Books). I came away from the meeting wondering why apparently comments.



AI Magazine Cumulative Index: Volumes 1-4

AI Magazine

How to Get the Most Out of IJCAI-83 Vol IV, No 1, p 35, Winter-Spring, 1983.


Talking to UNIX in English: An Overview of an On-Line UNIX Consultant

AI Magazine

The goal of the Unix Consultant is to provide a natural language help facility that allows new users to learn operating systems conventions in a relatively painless way. UC is not meant to be a substitute for a good operating system command interpreter, but rather, an additional tool at the disposal of the new user, to be used in conjunction with other operating system components.



Towards Chunking as a General Learning Mechanism

Classics

"Chunks have long been proposed as a basic organizational unit for human memory. More recently chunks have been used to model human learning on simple perceptual-motor skills. In this paper we describe recent progress in extending chunking to be a general learning mechanism by implementing it within a general problem solver. Using the Soar problem-solving architecture, we take significant steps toward a general problem solver that can learn about all aspects of its behavior. We demonstrate chunking in Soar on three tasks: the Eight Puzzle, Tic-Tat-Toe, and a part of the RI computer-configuration task. Not only is there improvement with practice, but chunking also produces significant transfer of learned behavior, and strategy acquisition."Proceedings of the AAAi-84 National Conference. AAAI, University of Texas at Austin, TX, August, 1984.


Automatic synthesis of fine-motion strategies for robots

Classics

Active compliance enables robots to carry out tasks in the presence of significant sensing and control errors. Compliant motions are quite difficult for humans to specify, however. Furthermore, robot programs are quite sensitive to details of geometry and to error characteristics and must, therefore, be constructed anew for each task. These factors motivate the search for automatic synthesis tools for robot program ming, especially for compliant motion. This paper describes a formal approach to the synthesis of compliant-motion strategies from geometric descriptions of assembly operations and explicit estimates of errors in sensing and control.