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C00002 00002	equip[f81,jmc]		Equipment needs for Formal Reasoning Group
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equip[f81,jmc]		Equipment needs for Formal Reasoning Group

	The formal reasoning group has the following requirements
for research equipment:

1. Large address space LISP.  Several programs are being developed
more slowly than if they didn't have to be squeezed into the 18 bit
addresses allowed by the PDP-10 LISPs.

2. LISP compute cycles.  We expect that the Advice Taker program
will require substantial computation.

3. More file space.  Frequent file purges hamper work.  We need to
keep on line many core images and source files of programs under
development.

4. Terminal access from offices.  It is inconvenient to work in
terminal rooms.  Our present Datadisc display system is ten years
old and dying.

	To some extent these requirements are contradictory with
the presently available equipment.  LISP machines have the address
space and the computational capacity but must be located in terminal
rooms rather than offices.  Eventually we would like to get
time-shared remote access to large address fast LISP computation.

	We should not neglect the possibility that new languages
such as the logic programming language PROLOG will become important
for AI work.