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C00002 00002	ideas[e85,jmc]		
C00003 00003	sep 5 - Pednault's important trivial discovery.
C00005 00004	sep 5 - Lewontin's useful ideas
C00007 00005	sep 26 - Counter to Soviet ploy
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ideas[e85,jmc]		

jul 28 - Procedural prolog worth studying
Prolog with asserts and retracts only corresponds to
procedural languages.  While the pure Prolog is more elegant,
the procedural language should also be studied.  We should
add commitments and references to the past.  Perhaps also
explicit contexts?

sep 5 - Pednault's important trivial discovery.
  On p.20 of his
"Preliminary report on a theory of plan synthesis" he tells us
that if  p  is one of the final goals, there is a time at which  p
is achieved and maintained.  If  p  and  q  are two final goals,
and the truth of  p  prevents the achievement of  q,  then  any
plan must finally achieve  p  after it finally achieves  q.
This is obvious but was not imbedded in previous planning systems.
Moral: We will discover lots of common sense after many years
that will seem obvious once stated.

Pednault's ideas overlap my idea about doing what might as well
be done first first and what might as well be done last last.

When operators commute there is the possibility of useless n!
searches.  Thus we need lemmas that operators commute.

What about a paper on planning?
plans with loops
plans that take into account commuting operators
plans that are interruptible to high level when common sense
is required, e.g. while we are at the airport, a policeman
asks us to wait until they have removed a would-be hijacker.

sep 5 - Lewontin's useful ideas
Lewontin's Dialectical Biologist contains some good
ideas amidst the Marxist junk.  He essentially says that to
analyze evolution in terms of progress, one needs a commitment
about what is to constitute progress.  Consider the following
gedanken-experiment: Put a representative selection of modern
animals in a Paleozoic environment, along with the Paleozoic
animals.  Would the modern animals dominate - given (say)
the 300 million years of further evolution?  It seems to me
that then answer isn't obvious unless the animals include men of
the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.
Technological man would dominate any environment that didn't kill
us immediately, because we could figure out how to use whatever
resources were available.

sep 26 - Such experiments were made.  There is no case where life
from an isolated island became ecologically important by escaping
to a mainland.  The reverse has often occurred.  Rats, goats and
many plants have devastated previously isolated environments.
Indeed as far as I know, no plant or animal from the Americas has
become ecologically important in Europe, Asia or Africa except
as a cultivar, while the reverse process has been important.

sep 26 - Counter to Soviet ploy
The Soviets are said to oblige people with contacts
with foreigners to report on their activities and attitudes
and on the possibilities of using these people.  A great many
peace inclined people don't behave as if they believe this.
Perhaps a case could be set up in which communications about
a prominent naif could be intercepted and later published.
It would be ideal if the communication would be oral and even
better if they were in English.