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@make(letterhead,Phone"497-4430", Who"John McCarthy", Logo Old, Department CSD)
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@begin(address)
Dr. Robert Kowalski
Imperial College, University of London
Department of Computing
180 Queen's Gate
London SW7 2BZ
United Kingdom
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@greeting(Dear Bob:)
@begin(body)
Thanks for your notes on the history of logic programming.  I hope that they
diminish rather than increase any controversy between you and Alain and others.
Apart from that, I have no comments since I did not take part in the event
discussed.

I have a few remarks about your comments on my own work on the map coloring
problem.  I was not especially seeking intelligent behavior, but merely 
exploring how far one could go towards getting a desired algorithm keeping the
logic fixed and changing the control.  Was I mistaken in attributing this 
general idea to you?  If you were to change the word "description" to "logic"
and the word "intelligent" to "desired" it would correspond to what I 
thought I was doing.

In your reference, you might simply say "McCarthy, unpublished."  When I
get around to publishing this idea, I will also have to refer to Peter
Szeredi's Introspective Prolog Interpreter in which he realized my idea about
how to do the Kempe algorithm.  However, I do not regard the approach as
successful so far.  Doing the Kempe algorithm via Introspection seems more
a @i(tour de force) than a natural style of programming.
@end(body)
Best Regards,




John McCarthy
Professor of Computer Science