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∂AIL Professor Allen Selverston↓Department of Biology↓UCSD↓La Jolla, CA 92093∞
Dear Professor Selverston:

	Arthur Thomas has asked me to write you concerning his job
qualifications, but he didn't say what kind of job he is applying
for.  I assume it is junior faculty or research associate.

	He came to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, because
we thought we needed a psychology student to make psychological
experiments in vision suggested by our AI work.  I started him
on making a program to display random-dot-stereograms with a view
to continuing with a program to analyze them and some further
experiments to define the limits of human capabilities.  Unfortunately,
Thomas turned out to be a member of the ten percent of the population
that can't see random-dot-stereograms at all, and I had no other
immediate idea on vision experiments connected to AI.

	He turned out to have strong philosophical interests and
undertook the large problem of constructing vision programs,
connecting them with our proof-checking program in predicate
logic, and constructing a theory of vision and a philosophical
framework connecting artificial intelligence, philosophy and
the physiology of vision.

	He produced an elephant of a thesis draft, and we blind
men on his interdisciplinary committee felt our various parts
of the elephant and pronounced it promising but of rather uneven
quality.  He has some revision to do, but I think he will produce
a thesis we will accept.  In my opinion, there are enough new
ideas in it concerning the connections of AI and philosophy,
even if I don't agree with most of them.
He would have finished sooner and with more acclaim had he
undertaken something less ambitious, but he has not been
easy to influence.

	His knowledge and capabilities in neurophysiology were
not exercised here in the Stanford AI Lab.

.sgn