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∂CSL Professor Andrei Ershov↓Computing Center↓Novosibirsk 630090↓USSR∞

Dear Andrei,

	It was good to get your Christmas letter.

	I hadn't known of your bout with cancer, and I hope all has
gone as well as your letter indicates.

	Also I hope all goes well with your computer-in-schools
project, which has attracted considerable press attention here.
There is some skepticism about Soviet ability to produce the
necessary microcomputers and willingness to distribute them
as widely as needed.  My own opinion is that you will succeed
eventually, although there may be delays.  My other opinion is
that a visit from you in connection with this project would
excite great interest and most likely offers of collaboration
from Americans with similar interests.

	I also have personal news.  My son Timothy Talcott McCarthy
was born last November 9 and is doing well.  I gave Bobko some
pictures for you.  Since Carolyn is now spending considerable
time at home, we now have two terminals instead of one and an
Imagen laser printer.

	Mostly I am working on formalizing common sense knowledge
using variants of circumscription.  The logic part is going
particularly well, since my collaborator, Vladimir Lifschitz,
knows more logic than I.  As usual the really hard part is
isolating the common sense knowledge.  However, many more people
all over the world are working on this problem that I used to
have almost to myself.  The ``blocks world'' has been revived,
and it is now agreed that not all its problems have been solved.

	Les Earnest is now working for me again, after spending
five years starting a company called Imagen that makes laser
printers.  This is in connection with a project to make a Lisp
for parallel computers.  The language is called Qlisp.  A paper
on it by Richard Gabriel and me was published in the proceedings
of the 1984 Lisp Conference under the name Qlambda.  We only later
changed the name to Qlisp, when Earl Sacerdoti, who had used the
name Qlisp for something else, agreed his usage was retired, so
we could have the name.

	Our other project, not really started, is an editor-based
operating system for IBM's newly announced PC-RT.  RT stands for
RISC technology, and the architecture is one that John Cocke
developed many years ago.
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	My best regards to Nina and your children.  Also transmit
my regards to Marchuk when you next see him.

	Your colleague Bobko came by for a conference at Stanford.
Unfortunately, I was very busy and had to make a trip that week,
so I didn't get a chance to invite him to visit the Department.
However, I passed your letter on to Feigenbaum, who may have
had some time.  Knuth is in Massachusetts for the year.

	Bobko gave me your papers and the book.  I was impressed by the
size of the edition.  So far I have read only the introduction,
and I was wondering whether the students or even their teachers,
except in places like Akademgorodok, will follow the casual
references to thermonuclear reactors, etc.

.regp