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%6S%5 Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, STANFORD UNIVERSITY, Stanford, California 94305
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	Douglas B. Lenat
	Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
	Stanford University
	Stanford, California  94305
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Love,
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Doug
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.LTR(Avra Cohn)
Dept of AI
U of Edinburgh
Hope Park Square
Meadow Lane NE
Edinburgh EH8 9NW Scotland
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Dear Avra,


Hope all is going well for you. It was nice to talk (albeit over the net).

The IJCAI was a strange conference; I think I only went to 2 or 3 talks!
There was no information dissemination system; there were dozens of changes in
the schedule and no way to find them out until the talk started; no way to
get messages to or contact other specific participants, etc.
The alltime loser was when the slide projector failed during my talk. I had
decided to open with a joke. It was something like "Sor far, only 1 good
"intelligent" system has ever been developed, but the manufacturer hasn't
released the details of its programming...", and meanwhile a picture of a
human brain was supposed to flash onto the screen. Well, the projector broke,
and I had my back to the screen so I didn't know it. The utter silence totally
broke my composure, and when I finally found out that none of my slides were
being seen, I had to go back and get a Vu-graph projector (I brought vu-graphs
along in case the Russians didn't have a slide projector). But their machine
was different from our vu-graph projectors: its fan was incredible! When I
turned it on, my vu-graphs scatterred across the stage!
As I collapsed into my seat afterwards, my only consolation was watching
the same thing happen to Cordell and Chuck Reiger. Later, I had mixed feelings
when everyone I knew said they hadn't seen it because they weren't there.
Sigh.

I met with Cordell for 1 hour last week about AM, the first time since last
Spring. He didn't seem to grok it, and asked for a two page summary, which
didn't exactly make my day. Luckily, I got an unsolicited offer from Bledsoe
to come and talk at Austin this Winter, and that brightened up my week.

I think I may send in a paper to the AISB conference this summer at Edinburgh.
Do you know anything about it? Will you be there this Summer? The notice tried
to get participants to pay for rooms %2now%*. Is that really necessary?
Would you like to have anything to do with the paper?

The summary of AM hasn't changed much from the Spring. I've enclosed some
sample output for you to look at. If you want, you can run it while logged
into Sumex. Just get into Lisp, then type LOAD(L), then START().
If you run into any problems, let me know. 

Right now, AM can get new Beings via examples, generalizing, as the result
of composing operations, and as the result of coalescing an operation.
"Coalescing" means examining a function of several arguments, f(w,x,y,z),
deciding that 2 of those arguments come from the same domain, then creating
a new Being g, defined say as g(a,b,c)=f(a,b,a,c).
The new Being "Genl-obj-equal" AM creates, a generalization of object-equality,
is really the relation "Is-of-equal-length-as"; i.e., cardinality.

My next step is to introduce a Being which takes a structure and an operation,
f, and replaces each element x in the structure by f(x). If f(x) is a constant
list segment, then this should lead to something like multiplication.
If f is taken as reverse-ordered-pair, then this should lead to inverse-relation.
A whole slew of things for me to do in the near future is on file
TODO[AM,DBL]  at SAIL, which you might want to look at.

Last night Merle, Dave Barstow, Linda and I went to see "Fritz the Cat."
What a loser. It's been so long since I've seen a good movie! What is the
entertainment like in Edinburgh? We saw Robert Klein here last month, and
he put on one of the funniest shows I've ever seen.

What is the cost of living around where you are? What about the salaries?

Oh, well, tha's about all for now. I'll wirte again if anyhting interesting
happens with me and/or AM.


.DBL