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C00002 00002	Dear Professor Gelfand:
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Dear Professor Gelfand:

	Thank you for your letter about the panel on "Mathematics,
Cybernetics and AI' at 4IJCAI.  As you know, I am replacing Prof.
Jack Minker as co-chairman of the panel and was not involved in the
original arrangements, but here are my ideas of the problem before us.
I don't think they are too different from Professor Minker's original
proposal as accepted by the Conference Committee, and I hope they
will seem reasonable to you also.

	Both %2cybernetics%1 as orignally conceived by Norbert Wiener
are concerned with goal-seeking systems.
However, cybernetics, both as initially conceived and as it subsequently
developed is to a large extent concerned with the case in which the
state space is R%6n%1 with a metric for evaluating
the distance of a state from the goal state together with a rule
that gives the effects of actions.  It seems to me that the emphasis
in cybernetics has been on those cases that can be treated mathematically.
As the mathematics has improved, the cases that have been treated
have expanded.  Besides this narrow sense of cybernetics, institutions
with the word "cybernetics" in their name have undertaken a variety of
activities some of which they also call "cybernetics".

	Artificial intelligence is concerned with the activities involved
in intelligent behavior, and the main initial activity was the search
of discrete spaces such as move trees and proof trees.  The emphasis has
been rather empirical, and the algorithms studied have rarely lent
themselves to mathematical treatment.

	Nevertheless, there is a certain overlap between activities called
cybernetics and those called artificial intelligence.  In particular, some
kinds of search procedures have been studied mathematically, and some
methods such as dynamic programming have been suggested for application
to AI type problems.

	In my view, it would be interesting for the panel members to discuss
what kinds of problems lend themselves to the kind of mathematics
developed in connection with cybernetics.  Perhaps there might be a survey
of these methods from the cybernetics side, and a survey of problems from
the AI side.  This might then result in a fairly lively discussion of
the prospects for the further extension of mathematical methods.

	... more general discussion here

	You probably know that when Jack Minker first organized the panel,
he invited his friend Alexander Lerner and that this gave rise to some
discussion that was resolved in a meeting at M.I.T. involving A.P. Ershov,
Victor Briabrin, and ... Samoilenko.  Matters were proceeding along the
Part of the result of this discussion was your and my appointment as
co-chairmen of the panel and the confirmation of Lerner's participation.
More recently, a %2New York Times%1 article asserting that Lerner had been
told he could not even go to Tblisi gave rise to considerable excitement
resulting in the events mentioned in the enclosed letters.  As you see,
we are proceeding on the basis that the %2New York Times%1 was mistaken,
and if this turns out not to be true, there will be quite a flap.

	Besides me, I am inviting Bertram Raphael and Max Clowes to
participate, because the both know quite a bit about both artificial
intelligence and work that has gone under the name of cybernetics.

	I am looking forward to meeting with you in Tblisi.

Sincerely yours,

organization of individuals
reference to previous arrangements
authority of program chairman