R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), by Karel Capek is part of HackerNoon's Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. Box candy. 1 Pad and blotter. 1 Letter opener. 1 Cigarette box. 1 Inkwell stand. 1 Practical buzzer (6 buttons). Off L.: 1 Fountain pen (for Busman). 1 Telephone buzzer. 1 Siren whistle. On Table L.C.: 2 Book ends (wooden).

Human programmers seem to know a lot about programming. This suggests a way to try to build automatic programming systems: encode this knowledge in some machine-usable form. In order to test the viability of this approach, knowledge about elementary symbolic programming has been codified into a set of about four hundred detailed rules, and a system, called PECOS, has been built for applying these rules to the task of implementing abstract algorithms. The implementation techniques covered by the rules include the representation of mappings as tables, sets of pairs, property list markings, and inverted mappings, as well as several techniques for enumerating the elements of a collection. The generality of the rules is suggested by the variety of domains in which PECOS has successfully implemented abstract algorithms, including simple symbolic programming, sorting, graph theory, and even simple number theory.

Summary of Stanford Ph.D. dissertation, Computer Science Dept. Stanford University (1977).Artificial Intelligence 12(2): 73-119.

A theorem prover for part of arithmetic in described which proves theorems by representing them in the form of a diagram or network. The nodes of this network represent 'ideal integers', i.e. objects which have all the properties of integers, without being any particular intoger. The links in the network represent relationships between 'ideal integers'. The procedures which draw these diagrams make elementary deductions based on their built-in knowledge of the functions and predicates of arithmetic. This theorem prover is intended as a model of some kinds of human problem-solving behaviour. Also found at EdinburghIn IJCAI-73: THIRD INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, 20-23 August 1973, Stanford University Stanford, California.

A program was writte n to solve calculus word problems. The program, CARPS (CAlculus Rate Problem Solver), is restricte d to rate problems. The overall plan of the program is simila r to Bobrow's STUDENT, the primary difference being the introductio n of "structures " as the internal model in CARPS. Structures are stored internally as trees, each structure holding the information gathered about one object.In Walker, D. E. & Norton, L. N. (eds. ), IJCAI 1969: INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, May 7-9, 1969 Washington, D. C., pp. 241-252

"The LISP language is designed primarily for symbolic data processing. It has been used for symbolic calculations in differential and integral calculus, electrical circuit theory, mathematical logic, game playing, and other fields of artificial intelligence.LISP is a formal mathematical language. It is therefore podsible to give a concise yet complete description of it. Such is the purpose of this first section of the manual. Other sections will describe ways of using LISP to advantage and will explain extensions of the language which make it a convenient programming system."The M.I.T. Press

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