COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00002 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	.require "let.pub[let,jmc]" source
C00004 ENDMK
C⊗;
.require "let.pub[let,jmc]" source;
∂CSL Professor Gordon Novak↓Computer Science Department
↓University of Texas↓Austin Texas 78712-1188∞

Dear Gordon:

	Jon Doyle is well qualified for a tenure track position,
although I would have reservations about granting tenure at this
time were that in question.  His two major clearly important pieces of work are
his reason maintenance system (formerly truth maintenance system) and
his work with Drew McDermott on non-monotonic logic.  The former
has led to further work along the same lines, and the latter is
one of the major attempts at formalizing non-monotonic reasoning.

	For the last few years he has been working on more philosophical
and methodological problems of AI and cognitive science.  I haven't
been following it closely, but I think it still isn't clear whether
his approach is the right one.  His ideas about dialectical reasoning,
not Marxism or Hegelianism but reasoning about a question by developing
pro and con arguments are intriguing, but so far as I know they aren't
yet very close to being implementable in a computer.

	I think there is a good chance that Jon Doyle will make
major contributions to computer science.

.reg