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  \def\sendingaddress{Arthur L. Samuel\par
    The Sequoias\par
    501 Portola Road, box 8214\par
    Portola Valley, CA 94025\par
    \up[415\up]\thinspace 424-4233\par}
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    The Sequoias\par
    501 Portola Road, box 8214\par
    Portola Valley, CA 94025 USA}
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    The Sequoias\par
    501 Portola Road\par
    Portola Valley, CA 94025 USA}
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    Computer Science Department\par
    Stanford University\par
    Stanford CA 94305 USA}
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\hskip3.9truein  Arthur Samuel, Chairman
    \nobreak\smallskip
\hskip3.9truein  Bill Beatty
    \nobreak\smallskip
\hskip3.9truein  Joe Beck
    \nobreak\smallskip
\hskip3.9truein  Paula Burr
    \nobreak\smallskip
\hskip3.9truein  Leslie Dobbins
    \nobreak\smallskip
\hskip3.9truein  Richard Ives
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\personal
\address
Carr,McClellan,Ingersoll,Thompson \& Horn
att. Mr. Arthur H. Bredenbeck
216 Park Rd. P.O.Box 513
Burlingame, CA 94011-0513

\body
Dear Mr. Bredenbeck:

I have thought through the complications that are involved if the proposed
Trust fund is broadened to include most of my assets and if the securities
held by the Trust are placed in a Brokerage Account.

To make my wishes clear, I have drafted the enclosed.  I am sure that you
will be amused by my pseudo-legal phraseology but I do hope that I have
cleared up any possible ambiguity.  You will have to put the ideas into
the proper legal form, leaving out matters that do not need to be
mentioned and adding those that do.

\als
\fin


\stanford
\address
Government Data Publications 
1120 Connecticut Ave.
Washington, D.C. 20036

\body
Gentlemen:

I have just received your invoice, number V81080, which was routed to me from
Stanford University's accounting office, for some publications that I never
intended to order. Fortunately, I have no authority to authorize purchases
for Stanford and your letter was routed to me for clarification.

I am quite indignant about this matter, as I was fooled into initialing an
order form in the belief that you were only requesting the verification
that you had my name and address listed correctly.  Your order form, as I
now see that it was so indicated at the top, is very misleading, to say
the least.

Furthermore, your action in sending you invoice directly to Stanford
University's Accounting Department, rather than to me, only confirms in my
mind that you were hoping that the invoice would be duely paid without my
being made aware of your trickery.

Please remove my name from your records as a subscriber and cancel any
records you may have that indicate me as ever having been a subscriber.

I have not reported this incident to the Better Business Bureau but I will
certainly do so if you do not inform me to the effect that you have
properly corrected your records and that you will take no further action
to collect for any literature that you may have mailed or will mail to me.
I would also strongly urge you to correct your order form so that others
will not be similarly mislead.

\als
\fin


\personal
\address
Explorama
701 Sutter Street
San Francisco, CA 94109

\body
Dear Explorana:

I am enclosing a check for \$42 and a Explorama 1986/87 Subscription Order
Form for one Reserved Seat Series Ticket for the Redwood City Sunday
Matinee.

I am using an old 1985/1986 form, suitably marked up for 1986/1987 as I
was unable to locate a copy of the form for the 1986/1987 series.

Please note that I walk with a cane and I would prefer a seat located
toward the rear of the auditorium so that I will not have to go down any
more steps without railings that absolutely necessary.

\als
\fin

%\personal
\stanford
\address
Mr. Michael G. Harrington
Residence Life Office
Southeastern Mass.~University Dorms
N. Dartmouth, MA 02747

\body
Dear Mr.~Harrington:

Thank you for your letter of March 25th.

I am quite at loss to know what I can send you regarding the ``details''
of my checker program. The final version was written in the assembly
language for the DEC10 computer and would be quite unintelligible to anyone
not familiar with this computer and its machine code.

Also there is the matter of size.
The program consists of 4 main modules and a number of auxiliary files
that can be loaded in different combinations to conduct different
learning and playing experiments.  The main part of the program contains
thousands of lines of code and it references a file of perhaps 30,000
stored moves of master play during certain kinds of learning.  All of this
could be retrieved from our dump tapes, but I would have trouble
sorting it all out at this late date. If I were to return to programming
checkers, I would find it easier to start out from scratch, rather
than to try to extract anything of value from this old program.

It is, of course, relatively easy to write a playing program without
learning.  I wrote such a program several years ago for a small game
playing machine that is no longer on the market.  This program included
all necessary details to play at five different proficiency levels, to
accept joy-stick introduced moves, checking them for legality, and to
handle the board display, and it even played a joyful tune when it won and a dirge
when it lost. I was able to get it all into a 4k byte rom
unit.  But this was also written in an assembly language, in this case an
obsolete language for an obsolete machine.

I am sorry to have to be so negative but you can see why.

\als
\fin



\parindent=0pt
\parindent 20pt

I was very disturbed, on returning from a vacation trip, to learn that you
are planning to install a palliative emergency warning systen rather
than doing something about a more effective scheme. This is all the more
distressing when one better solution has already been demonstrated to you.

Yes, I know that the Metal Strip scheme is used elsewhere but that only
means that others have adopted an ineffectual scheme rather than tackling
the real problem.  An ineffectual scheme is worse than no scheme at all.

Consider a hypothetical situation, and one that is all too likely to happen:

{\parindent=35pt
\narrower
Mrs X wakes up feeling too sick to go into breakfast and so decides to get
the morning paper and come back to bed.  Accordingly, she retrieves her
morning paper and in the process trips the Metal Strip.

Unfortunately, Mrs X is really unwell and so she faints on her way back to
bed, falls, and perhaps even breaks her hip. In any event, when she regains
consciousness, she is too weak to crawl to the phone. Now, I ask you, when
will she get help?  Obviously it will not be until after 1:00 P.M. the next day,
some 30 hours later!

Without the confounded Strip, some of Mrs X's friends might well check up
on her but with the strip tripped they will decide the Mrs X is up and
about and so do nothing, at least not until the next day.
\smallskip}

An ineffectual scheme is worse than no scheme at all.

\als
\fin


\personal
\address
The Bank of New York
UIT Unitholder Relations 9T
P.O.Box 11227
Church Street Station
New York, NY 10249

\body
Gentlemen:

I would like to take advantage of your offer to consolidate my two
accounts with Mutual Investment Trust Fund, that is, if the offer applies
to my accounts, one now paid by you and the other paid by The Chase
Manhattan Bank.

The two accounts are:

$$\vbox {\halign{\hfill#\hfill&&\quad\hfil #\hfil\cr
units&	Account No.&	Description&	Paid by\cr
\noalign{\bigskip}
\tt 10&\tt 11232559-2&	4th California&	The Bank of New York\cr
\tt 40& ? & 32nd California& The Chase Manhattan Bank\cr
}}$$

There seems to be no difference between the addresses under which
these two accounts are held except for the use of the longer Zip code,
94025-7606 in your records. The checks for both accounts bear the same
record dates and the same payable dates, although Chase Manhatten are usually
somewhat more prompt in sending the checks then The Bank of New York.
Both accounts carry my correct identification number which is 091-09-8617.

\als
\fin


\personal
\address
Ms. Pamela Whitney
Rasearcher, Understanding Computers
Time-Life Books Inc.
777 Duke St.
Alexandra, Virginia 22314

\body
Dear Ms. Whitney:

My first comment about the ``Understanding Computers'' manuscript has to
do with the very first page and possibly the preceding page which you did
not send me.  

I am afraid that a wrong impression might be created regarding my part in
the entire University of Illinois computer project and regarding the
University's willingness to support the work. It is true that I had
trouble in getting support from the University for the purchase of a
computer. I had been able to get travel money to visit the Institute for
Advanced Studies at Princeton where John von Neumann was building a
computer and I had tried in vain to find some organization that would even
quote us a price for building us a computer similar to the one that the
group at Princeton was building.  We had estimated that it would cost us
\$90,000 to build a computer on our own.  For a while, the then Dean of
the graduate School had tabled a report that several of us had written and
the entire project was in limbo.

However, by the time that I proposed writing a checker program, the new
Dean of the Graduate School, Louis Ridenour, had gotten the University to
appropiate \$110,000 for the project.  We had hired several new people and
I had started several graduate students on research projects toward the 
development of some of the necessary computer components. This was an entirely
new field and I and my students were later to get quite a few patents on some
of the work done during this period.

 It was because the early design work and this component development work
was progressing so slowly, and because the money was not lasting as long
as we had hoped, that I proposed building a small machine and of trying to
do something spectacular with it. This had little effect on the work actually
being done and there never was a `small computer that was never completed'.

Actually, my checker work took longer than I had assumed it would, since I
was new at programming, who wasn't, and since the programming had to be done
in octal without the aid of even an assembly language which had yet to be
invented. The programming job was also much more difficult than I had 
anticipated and I had to modify the code each time we changed the
projected computer commands. Added to all this, I was not free to devote
much time to the task, being the director of an Electron Devices
Laboratory and deeply involved with the design and development of new
electronic and magnetic devices for use in the new computer and, of
course, carrying a full teaching load in the Electrical Engineerimg
Department.

Incidentally, I was not `newly arrived' by this time, having joined the
faculty in the summer of 1946, and I was certainly less newly arrived than
most of the members of the project, since I had had a hand in hiring most
of them.

My interest in computers deepened and I decided in 1949 to leave the
University where the computer work had to take second place to teaching
demands and go with IBM where I could work full time on computers.

The University continued to work on the design new components and circuits
for a computer. It was successful in getting outside support without the
help of my checker program, and it was able to develop and build the
computer that became known as the `Illiac' and that was the first big
computer of the `von Neumann type' to be gotten into operation in the
United States.

The insert page 2 line 7 material is essentially correct, except tha I was
born in Emporia Kansas. I never heard of ``KOMING PLACE'' (is it a real
place or is this a copy editors space holding convention or a literary
allusion that I miss). I rather doubt if your readers will be interested
in the details regarding my missed PhD. If this is to be left in, perhaps
you should insert the word `earned' in the phrase, `though he lacked the
earned PhD thet was commonplace...'. I do have an honorary ScD.

The insert Page 4, Line 6 is, I think, quite misleading. In the first
place, it gives undue prominence to Cambridge University, although the
work of Wilkes at Cambridge did rank high and I therefore went there
frequently.  Actually, during a three year period when I spent roughly a
third of my time in Europe, I lectured at all of the major universities in
most of the major countries in western Europe, and at many governmental
and industrial laboratories and I was even invited to many industrial
laboratories.  I lectured on Computers in general and brought to Europe
the first detailed information on IBM's first large computer, the 701,
which every one wanted to hear about during that period.  I, of course,
also lectured on my checker program and this did give me entre'e to many
places.

I definitely object to the use of the expression ``valuable tips'' which
sounds like I was spying. I always made it perfectly clear that I worked
for IBM and that I was not after company secrets. Actually, most of the
worthwhile work on computers in Europe was being done at Univrsities and
it was being freely talked about. But it was one thing to hear about it
first hand and to actually see the experimental equipment, and quite
another thing to have to wait until the work was published.

I am quite at loss for the source of the statement ``but felt excluded by
what he perceived as clannishness among AI experts''.  I do not remember
ever making such a statement. There may be an element of truth to this
clannishness, although I am not even sure that there is, and I was never
excluded although I may not always have been a joiner. In any event,
publishing such a statement would certainly not be conducive toward
promoting better relations.  I am afraid that the part about my being sort
of a loner is certainly true, but I do not thing that anything is added to
your story by calling this fact to everyone's attention.  I do feel
strongly about the damage done by exaggerated optimism but I have always
objected to this ``bane of AI's existance'' and it is not something that
`over the years' I `began to object to'.  Why not say: ``Samuel has always
objected to what he labeled ...''.

Page 5 Line 3 replace `for many years' by `initially' in the corrected
text reading: ``As a result, the ability of the program was restricted,
initially, by Samuel's own limited knowledge and could play the game no
better than its creator''.  Some years were involved, not many, but this
was because some year elapsed between the time I started working on the
program and the time when I could get fairly unlimited access to a 701
computer to test the program in detail, and it was not long after I really
got working with a running program that I started to add learning to the
program and so was able to greatly improve the play.

I hope that this overlong harangue will be of some help.

\als

\fin



\address
Miss Alexa Knight
The Sequoias, Portola Valley
\body

Thank you for loaning me the 1-2-3 program material.

I spent some time reading the manual.  I did not touch the disks, both
because I believe that 1-2-3 will, unfortunately, be unsuited for the
Reasident's Council's needs and also because one must load a portion of
the operating system onto the disk before it is usable, just as required
by Visicalc. I was afraid that this would render the program unusable on
another computer, although I did not read the manual in enough detail to
be certain on this point. I just though it safer to do nothing.

1-2-3 is indeed considerably improved over Visicalc but in ways that
really do not make it very much more suitable for the Council's needs.

It now seems that the Council probably need some sort of data-base
program.  Unfortunately, all the ones that I know anything about are much
too complicated for casual use.  They are usually easy to use, once set
up, but the setting-up procedures can be quite messy.

\als

\fin

\personal
\address
Mr. Robert L. Hobson, Vice President
Endowment and Charitable Trust Services
Bank of America
P.O.Box 37121
San Francisco, CA 94137

\body

Dear Mr. Hobson:

I am sorry to have to bother you with the IRS matter that I called you
about this morning. It is quite possible that other contributors to the
same trust fund will have similar problems. I thought that you should know
about it.

As you suggest, I am enclosing copies of the information sent to me by the
IRS together with a copy of my letter to them.

\als

\fin


\personal
\address
Internal Revenue Service Center
Fresno, CA. 93888

\body

Gentlemen:

I am returning the first two pages of your letter dated 01/22/86 
with an explanation of my view of the situation with respect to my 1983 
tax return.  I would greatly appreciate hearing from you on this matter
at your earliest convenience as I will be leaving on a trip on February 25th
and I would like to get this matter settled before I leave.

While I made some of the mistakes that you report, I believe that the major
discrepency is, if fact, due to a misreading in your office of a
Schedule K-1 (form 1041) reporting \$8613 in income that was for
the fiscal year beginning 6-01-83 and ending 5-31-84 and that was, therefore,
reportable and, in fact, was reported by me on my 1984 tax return.  I am
enclosing a form from the Bank of America that supports this interpretation
for this first reporting of income from this newly established trust fund.

Apparently, this K-1 form, as submitted by the Northern California
Presbyterian Homes Inc. or by their agent, Bank of America, N.T. and S.A.
identification number 95-6785895, was mistakenly assumed by your office to
belong with my 1983 return, a natural enough mistake since a 1983 rather
than a 1984 year form was used for this reporting.  The form does contain
a typed statement to the effect that the return was for the fiscal year as
noted above, but this could easily have been overlooked.

It is my hope that this matter can be settled by a phone call so that I
will be able to get a check off without further delay for the amount that
I actually owe.

I can be reached during normal working hours on (415) 497-3330 or on
(415) 723-3330, and on (415) 851-2943 at other times.

\als

\fin


\personal
\address
Professor P. Masani
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA  15260
\body
Dear Professor Masani:

I am rushing to meet your deadline with the material that only reached me
on Wednesday.

Actually, everything seems to be in very good shape. The only corrections
that I might want to make are so trivial that I am disposed to ignore
them.  I really do not agree with the modern trend to use a minimum of
punctuation and I am happy to see that some badly needed commas were
actually added. These more than offset those that were removed.

So you can heave a sigh of relief and accept my portion as it now is.

\als
\annotations
enclosure: documents from your letter of June 26th.
\fin