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@make(letterhead,Phone"497-4430",Who"John McCarthy",Logo,Old, Department CSD)
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Mr. Ehud Shapiro
Department of Computer Science
Yale University
P.O. Box 2l58, Yale Station
New Haven, Connecticut  06520
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@greeting(Dear Mr. Shapiro:)
@begin(body)
	I should have answered your letter sooner, but I'm not very
prompt at answering letters.

	I think there are prospects of forming a logic programming
group at Stanford, but it may not be so easy as you think to get
grant support - at least to get it quickly.

	Antonio Porto is here for this quarter and is giving a course
in Prolog, the first in logic programming at Stanford.  I think logic
programming is here to stay, but I am far from concluding that it
dominates LISP for artificial intelligence programming, although I
don't exclude that possibility.  Anyway, I think that logic programming
is a worthy research subject that presents many questions worth
exploring.

	I don't understand why you want to tie logic programming to
distributed computing.  As far as I can see, distributed computing
has no special virtues; maybe you sometimes have to do it, although
even this is unclear.

	Your plans for a large project seem very ambitious and
would have to start gradually at Stanford,
although it might be that some other place eager to make a mark would
make a substantial initial commitment.  If you want to play for big
stakes try Harvard, which is nowhere in computer science, having not
recovered fully from Howard Aiken even after almost 20 years.  They
have money if they want to spend it, and they have good students.

	As to collaborators, that would also take time, although I
got a very good impression of Fernando Pereira when I met him at
the Queen Mary meeting.

	As for a month long visit around June, I can probably finance
it, but it should start after the theorem proving meeting in New York,
June 7-10, since that is when I will return from Europe.
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	If we decide to make you an offer, probably a year delay won't
help.  However, when you do come, I think you would have to plan
to stay here steadily, especially since you want to form a group.
Zohar Manna's effectiveness at Stanford has been severely affected
by the amount of time he has spent away from Stanford, since he
became a professor here.
@end(body)
Best regards,




John McCarthy
Professor of Computer Science





@flushleft(cc: Gene Golub, Ed Feigenbaum)