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From: FC01%USC-ECL@sri-unix.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Lisp Books, Nondeterminism, Japanese Effort
Message-ID: <3601@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 29-Jul-83 11:38:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.3601
Posted: Fri Jul 29 11:38:00 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 1-Aug-83 11:20:27 EDT
Lines: 42

Lots of things to talk about today, A good lisp book for the beginner:
The LISP 1.6 Primer. It really explains what's going down, and even
has exercises with answers. It is not specific to any particular lisp
of today (since it is quite old) and therefore gives the general
knowledge necessary to use any lisp (with a little help from the
manual).

Nondeterministic production systems: Lots of work has been done. The 
fact is that a production system is built under the assumption that 
there is a single global database. The tree version of a production 
system doesn't meet this requirement. On the other hand, there are 
many models of what you speak of.  The Petri-net model treats such 
things nondeterministically by selecting one or the other (assuming 
their results prevent each other from occuring) seemingly at random.  
Of course, unless you have a real parallel processor the results you 
get will be deterministic. I refer you to any good book on Petri-nets 
(Peterson is pretty good). Tree structured algorithms in general have 
this property, therefore any breadth-first search will try to do both 
forks of the tree at once. Other examples of theorem provers doing 
this are relatively common (not to mention most multiprocess operating
systems based on forks).

%th generation computers: There is a lot of work on the same basic
idea as 5th generation computers (a 5th generation computer by any
other name sounds better). From what I have been able to gather from
reading all the info from ICOT (the Japanese project directorate) they
are trying to do the project by getting foreign experts to come and
tell them how. They anounce their project, say they're going to lead
the world, and wait for the egos of other scientists to bring them
there to show them how to really do it. The papers I've read show a
few good researchers with real good ideas but little in the way of
knowing how to get them working. On the other hand, data flow, speech
understanding, systolic arrays, microcomputer interfaces to
'supercomputers' and high BW communications are all operational to
some degree in the US, and are being improved on a daily basis. I
would therefore say that unless we show them how, we will be the
leaders in this field, not they.

***The last article was strictly my opinion-- no reflection on anyone
else***

                        Fred