COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00013 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00003 00002	notes[s83,jmc]		miscellaneous
C00004 00003	Elaboration Tolerance
C00007 00004	April 19, 1983.  For discussion with Kahn and Ohlander.
C00009 00005	(GOAL conclusion(R))→(GOAL condition(R))
C00011 00006	April 19, 1983
C00012 00007	April 19, 1983  The Army Conference on Application of Artificial Intelligence
C00014 00008	April 20, 1983  Morality of deterrence
C00015 00009	Language translation
C00017 00010	I have had a second thought about our discussion of getting AI capability into
C00019 00011	Modifying programs without reading them.
C00023 00012	Discussion with Suppes
C00024 00013	believing the consequences of one's beliefs
C00025 ENDMK
C⊗;
notes[s83,jmc]		miscellaneous

Tasks:
blocks		Do example with circumscription
psycho		Really good example
		reread "Ascribing ... "
common		re-examine list of common sense abilities
		reformulate questions on mycin
Elaboration Tolerance
	Formalizations of general common sense facts should be, if possible, 
elaboration tolerant.  It should be possible to elaborate the description
they give to take into account more phenomena by adding sentences.  It should
not be necessary to take back existing sentences or even worse to change the
meanings of entities.

	This is rather unclear and I don't yet know how to state it more
clearly in general, but some examples can be given in which the idea is much
clearer.

	Consider a blocks world.  In the formulations common in AI, moving
a block from one location to another is a discrete act.  The preconditions
for and consequences of this action are described by suitable logical
sentences.  However, we sometimes also need to consider moving an object
as a continuous action capable, for example, of interruption.  In our
common sense thinking and in conversation we don't regard these two
notions of motion as contradictory and we can freely mix sentences
involving them.  Thus "He moved it from A to B and then while moving it
from B to C, he dropped it".  Other kinds of elaborations are possible,
e.g. "While he was moving the sugar from A to B, some of it spilled."

	Our formalizations should also tolerate such elaborations, and it
seems to me that neither the situation calculus  result(e,s)  formalism nor
STRIPS tolerates such elaborations, because neither has any way of going
from the discrete result of an event to continuous process.  However, it
seems that the situation calculus treatment can be modified to a more
elaboration tolerant form.
April 19, 1983.  For discussion with Kahn and Ohlander.

1.  ARPA or DEC
2.  CBCL, natural language
3.  Generally --the "new" ideas aren't that good.
4.  Changing programs without reading them.
5.  Other people's files,/National library compatible documents.
6.  Dialnet
7.  Common Sense
8.  Non-monotonic reasoning
9.  Standards
-----

Opel (if it was he) should be pilloried for advocating that IBM take a parasitic
attitude to artificial intelligence.  I - or Nils - should mention it in a AAAI
 speech advocating that IBM should pay extra (say about $150 million) when 
AI does pay off.
Palo Scientific Center
Harry Reinstein gave briefing.  boss↑2 = Horace Flatt
(GOAL conclusion(R))→(GOAL condition(R))

How do we get the backtracking after the


April 19, 1983  Principles of Rule-based expert systems by Buchanan and
Richard Duda

It would seem that data driven and goal driven systems are equivalent.  Each can
 model the other by reifying goals or conclusions.

Thus we model a goal driven system in a data driven system by allowing a 
sentence (goal G) and a data rule

Similarly we model a data driven system in a goal system by having a goal
(ASSERT X) and
April 19, 1983

Nevada (or much of it) has interior drainage.  Suppose the climate changed
so that Nevada got lots of rain.  How much water and how deep would it get
before it found a way out to the ocean?  Where?  Colorado river?  How much
rainfall would be needed?  -------- We might call this doctrine
"Dennettism" since "McCarthyism" has been used up.  ---------

Approximation by autonomous systems

He skied normally (for him) except that he bent his knees.  Thus we can use
circumscription to get consequences of counterfactuals.

April 19, 1983  The Army Conference on Application of Artificial Intelligence
to Battlefield Information Management

0.  DARPA
1.  Technological surprise?
2.  Intellectual mech.
	Human level
	Expert Systems
	Present limitations
	Scientific preparation for
	  a.  research
	  b.  practitioner

Vision --reduce end spoofing

CBCL -- Battlefield CL






1.  DARPA support -- hope it's now becoming useful
		     our responsibility to help.

2.  history; 1950 Turing, computers, distractions
				     neural nets
			             discrimination

3.  Intellectual mechanisms		robotics
    Intellectual problems		$10M  84
    Theory and experiment		$22M  85
     a.  basic experiment		Patience
     b.  applications			Natural selection
					Think of it as evolution in action

4.  Human level AI -- when
					drosophila
         SURPRISE

5.  Expert systems, Mycin, production rule based systems.

					ADA vs LISP?

6   Need for common sense

	CBCL -- military communication lang.
	semantics of natural languages

7.  education 
	for research
	for practitioners
April 20, 1983  Morality of deterrence
		--necessity of objectivity
		--religious style of argument
Language translation

Automatic language translation was effectively dropped in the middle of 
1960s as too ambitious for the linguistics, artificial intelligence, and
computer capabilities of the time.  With improvements in these sciences
and technologies it may be worthwhile to try again with more modest
goals.  The languages of primary interest are Russian as before but also
Japanese.  A worthwhile goal would be a reader's workstation that could
accept a microfiche text, do the necessary OCR, referring doubtful
characters to the user and do a rough translation.  If the translation of
the sentence was doubtful the user could ask for dictionary entries for particular
words.  He could also ask for the reasoning behind a proposed translation
and ask for alternate translation.  The workstation would be useful even if
it required that the user have taken a one semester course in the grammar of
the language and the use of the workstation, because many times as many people
will do this as will study for the several years required to acquire a fluent
reading knowledge of either Japanese or Russian.
I have had a second thought about our discussion of getting AI capability into
industry.  This is to ask what kind of capability we want industry to have.
Is it to make more SRI's or BBN's with basic research capability and the ability
to make high quality unsolicited research proposals?  If so this can be done in the 
same way that SRI and BBN improved their capability -- a steady diet of contracts to
a capable group.  The alternate goal is to transfer the technology of expert systems
so that operational systems can be contracted at reasonable cost.  Judging from
the Army Conference and other indications, a fair number of companies claim this
capability, perhaps more than the present market or the people supply will support.
Natural selection will prune and improve this group.
Modifying programs without reading them.

	To an increasing extent the job of a programmer involves modifying
existing programs rather than writing them from scratch.  Even when a
program is written from scratch, this is because a program that performs
most of the desired functions is too incomprehensible to modify.

	If we make an analogy between modifying a computer program and
educating a human, then present day programming corresponds to education
by brain surgery.

	There are programming languages and styles of using them that come
closer to our English language ability to modify the behavior of another
person without fully understanding the present behavior.  Here are some
examples of modifications possible in English which we would like to be
able to do with computer languages.  We use an airline reservation system
as vehicle for our example.

April 21, 1983

When can we modify without looking.

1.  When the program can optimize or satisfice subject to constraints, we
can always add a new constraint.  The task remains definite even though
there is a risk of error if the constraint set becomes incompatible.

	This works provided the desired constraints can be expressed in
language not referring to the internal names of the program.

	2.  In general, modification without understanding requires the
program and its modifications refer only to the external world.  We can
minimize the understanding required if the amount of innards is minimized.
Thus we minimize jargon, and this might be a technical notion of jargon.
We can use abbreviations defined in the program so long as the full
expressions are available for making modifications.

	3.  Circumscriptions will be needed in compiling the program.
Perhaps when such a circumscription reaches a disjunction, the user must
be questioned as to which alternative he prefers.  This won't always be
true.

	4.  We require creativity when new entities must be introduced to
solve the problem.  Such aspects of programs cannot be modified without
reading unless the compiler can understand the program and supply the
creativity.

Discussion with Suppes
The epistemology of quantum mechanics should be based on amplitudes
rather than on probabilities.

Dirac
von Neumann
The Lifshitz book on quantum electrodynamics points out that the
notion of wave function isn't relativistically invariant.  Are
the conceptual foundations of relativistic quantum mechanics
different from those of non-relativistic QM?
believing the consequences of one's beliefs
Circumscriptions are required here.

1. It believes any consequence of its beliefs unless ...

2. If I can do the inference, he can unless ...