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A previous paper presented an efficient algorithm, called the Recomputation Algorithm, for evaluating a rational expression to within any desired tolerance on a computer which performs variable-precision arithmetic operations. The Recomputation Algorithm can be applied to expressions involving any variable-precision operations having O(10-... + Σ ∣ε∣) error bounds, where p denotes the operation's precision and ε, denotes the error in the operation's with argument. This paper presents an efficient variable-precision exponential operation with an error bound of the above order. Other operations, such as log, sin, and cos, which have simple series expansions, can be handled similarly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the large number of strategies and inference rules presently under consideration in automated theorem proving, there is a need for developing a language especially oriented toward automated theorem proving. This paper discusses some of the features and instructions of this language. The use of this language permits easy extension of automated theorem-proving programs to include new strategies and/or new inference rules. Such extendability will permit general experimentation with the various alternative systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents several letters to the editor on issues related to computer languages. Comments on the usage of heavy sprinkling of capital letters in the computing literature; Discussion on the paper related to the statistical method used in the study of roundoff propagation in the solution of ordinary differential equations; View that vagueness of the terms "information retrieval," "cognitive processes," "artificial intelligence," etc., has led to too many conferences that have tried to span so wide a field that they have not been effective in any one area.

The article presents information on technical program and sessions of the "25th Anniversary Conference" of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which would be held in Boston, from August 14-16, 1972. John J. Donovan would hold Feature session on "Current Research in Computer Science." The following papers would be presented in the paper sessions: "Artificial Intelligence: Theoretical Papers," by George W. Ernst; "Artificial Intelligence: General Paper," by Thomas G. Evans; "Implementation of Medical Information Systems," by Lael Gatewood; "Computer Languages for Interactive Health Services," by Allan H. Levy; and others.

The article presents information about some forthcoming conferences related to the computer industry. The Third Technical Symposium of the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) will be held at the Niel House Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, during February 22-23, 1973. A conference on Principles of Programming Languages, sponsored jointly by the ACM Special Interest Group on Automata and Computability Theory and the ACM Special Interest Group for Programming Languages, will be held at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, during October 1-3, 1973. A conference on Cognitive Verfahren und Systeme (Artificial Intelligence) will be held in Hamburg, German Federal Republic, during April 11-13, 1973. The Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science will be held at the Hilton Hotel, Los Angeles, California, during October 21-25, 1973. The First Annual Symposium of the newly formed ACM Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation will be held in Palo Alto, California, during February 26-28, 1973.

A source of ideas for automata theory — the study of the brain — has been pushed aside in mathematical development of the theory. This paper suggests the ways in which automata theory might evolve over the next 25 years if it is to contribute to an understanding of how the brain processes information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes a man-machine approach toward solving the traveling salesman problem, a class of scheduling and routing problem. Features of a computer-aided heuristic technique adopted for the problem; New directions in the fields of man-machine interaction and artificial intelligence arising from the approach.

The article offers information on upcoming congresses and symposiums in the U.S., including the Seventh Annual Symposium on Switching and Automata Theory to be held at the University of California, Berkeley, California, on October 26-28, 1966, the Coins Symposium on Learning, Adaptation, and Control in Information Systems to be held on August 22-24, 1966, and the Symposium on Biomathematics and Computer Science in the Life sciences to be held on March 24-26, 1966.

Comments on J.A. Moorer's article entitled "Music and Computer Composition." Criticism of the views of the author on musical composition; Results of the simulation of the compositional abilities of humans; Reply by Moorer on the criticism of his views.

A method is described for composing musical rounds by computer. This method uses some music theory plus additional heuristics. Fundamental to the method is a set of productions together with sets of applicability rules and weight rules which operate on the productions deciding when and to what extent they are available for use. Several rounds generated by the computer implementation of the method are presented. Generally, the resultant music sounds mediocre to the professional although usually pleasing to the layman. It appears that full-blown music theory is not needed for rounds—all the hardware required for structural Levels is not necessary for these pieces. The author has fried to address both musicians and computer scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines a method for calculating the correction of regular computer languages. Requirements for the calculation; Application of method in information retrieval, artificial intelligence and spelling correction systems; Definition of a set of edit operations.

Describes a learning program which has been written in BASIC computer language to play four-player partnership dominoes. Application of different principles of artificial intelligence and problem solving; Description of the rules; Utilization of a strategy signature table which classifies board situations throughout the interactions of game parameters.

COKO III is a chess player written entirely in Fortran. On the IBM 360-65, COKO III plays a minimal chess game at the rate of .2 sec cpu time per move, with a level close to lower chess club play. A selective tree searching procedure controlled by tactical chess logistics allows a deploy merit of multiple minimal game calculations to achieve some optimal move selection. The tree searching algorithms are the heart of COKO's effectiveness, yet they are conceptually simple. in addition, an interesting phenomenon called a tree searching, catastrophe has plagued COKO's entire development just as it troubles a human player. Standard exponential growth is curbed to a large extent by the definition and trimming of the Fischer set. A clear distinction between tree pruning and selective tree searching is also made. Representation of the chess environment is described along with a strategical preanalysis procedure that maps the Lasker regions. Specific chess algorithms are described which could be used as a command structure by anyone desiring to do some chess program experimentation. A comparison is made of some mysterious actions of human players and COKO III. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem discussed is that of simulating human composition of Western popular music by computer and some relevant theories of music and harmony are given. Problems with this kind of program and several schemes that are known not to work are discussed. Several previous computer compositions are discussed, including the ILLIAC Suite. A program to generate short melody fragments was written to simulate some of the aspects of human composition. Five samples of its output are presented and discussed. It was discovered that although the fragments show many of the characteristics of popular melodies, they have a strangely alien sound. It is theorized that this is because the relevant probabilities which would discriminate against unfamiliar sequences were not used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A parallel processing algorithm for shrinking binary patterns to obtain single isolated elements, one for each pattern, is presented. This procedure may be used for counting patterns on a matrix, and a hardware implementation of the algorithm using large scale integrated technology is envisioned. The principal features of this method are the very small window employed (two-by-two elements), the parallel nature of the process, and the possibility of shrinking any pattern, regardless of the complexity of its configuration. Problems regarding merging and disconnection of patterns during the process as well as the determination of the maximum number of steps necessary to obtain a single isolated element from a pattern, are reviewed and discussed. An analogy with a neural network description, in terms of McCulloch-Pitts "neurons" is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes approaches to symbolic integration in the 1960s. Work on artificial intelligence which led to Slagle's Symbolic Automatic Integrator and Moses' Symbolic Integrator; Implementations from algebraic manipulation; Proof of the unsolvability of the problem for a class of functions derived from the mathematics approach; Generalizations of Risch algorithms for solving differential equations.

An elementary outline of the theorem-proving approach to automatic program synthesis Is given, without dwelling on technical details. The method Is Illustrated by the automatic construction of both recursive and Iterative programs operating on natural numbers, lists, ant frees. In order to construct a program satisfying certain specifications, a theorem induced by those specifications is proved, and the desired program Is extracted from the proof. The same technique is applied to transform recursively defined functions into iterative programs, frequently with a major gain in efficiency. It is emphasized that hi order to construct a program with loops or with recursion, the principle of mathematical Induction must be applied. The relation between the version of the induction rule used and the form of the program constructed is explored in some detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An automatic learning capability has been developed and implemented for use with the MULTIPLE (MULTIpurpose Program that LEarns) heuristic tree-searching program, which is presently being applied to resolution theorem-proving in predicate calculus. MULTIPLE's proving program (PP) uses two evaluation functions to guide its search for a proof of whether or not a particular goal is achievable. Thirteen general features of predicate calculus clauses were created for use in the automatic learning of better evaluation functions for PP. A multiple regression program was used to produce optimal coefficients for linear polynomial functions in terms of the features. Also, automatic data-handling routines were written for passing data between the learning program and the proving program, and for analyzing and summarizing results. Data was generally collected for learning (regression analysis) from the experience of PP. A number of experiments were performed to test the effectiveness and generality of the learning program. Results showed that the learning produced dramatic improvements in the solutions to problems which were in the same domain as those used for collecting learning data. Learning was also shown to generalize successfully to domains other than those used for data collection. Another experiment demonstrated that the learning program could simultaneously improve performance on problems in a specific domain and on problems in a variety of domains. Some variations of the learning program were also tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of augmented transition network grammars for the analysis of natural language sentences is described. Structure-building actions associated with the arcs of the grammar network allow for the reordering, restructuring, and copying of constituents necessary to produce deep-structure representations of the type normally obtained from a transformational analysis, and conditions on the arcs allow for a powerful selectivity which can rule out meaningless analyses and take advantage of semantic information to guide the parsing. The advantages of this model for natural language analysis are discussed in detail and illustrated by examples. An implementation of an experimental parsing system for transition network grammars is briefly described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent experiments in programming natural language question-answering systems are reviewed to summarize the methods that have been developed for syntactic, semantic, and logical analysis of English strings. It is concluded that at least minimally effective techniques have been devised for answering questions from natural language subsets in small scale experimental systems and that a useful paradigm has evolved to guide research efforts in the field. Current approaches to semantic analysis and logical inference are seen to be effective beginnings but of questionable generality with respect either to subtle aspects of meaning or to applications over large subsets of English. Generalizing from current small-scale experiments to language-processing systems based on dictionaries with thousands of entries-with correspondingly large grammars and semantic systems-may entail a new order of complexity and require the invention and development of entirely different approaches to semantic analysis and question answering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An algorithm for analyzing any context-free phrase structure grammar and for generating a program which can then parse any sentence in the language (or indicate that the given sentence is invalid) is described. The parser is of the "top-to-bottom" type and is recursive. A number of heuristic procedures whose purpose is to shorten the basic algorithm by quickly ascertaining that certain substrings of the input sentence cannot correspond to the target nonterminal symbols are included. Both the generating algorithm and the parser hove been implemented in RCA SNOBOL and have been tested successfully on a number of artificial grammars and on a subset of ALGOL. A number of the routines for extracting data about a grammar, such as minimum lengths of N-derivable strings and possible prefixes, are given and may be of interest apart from their application in this particular context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An experimental system that uses LISP to make a conceptual dictionary is described. The dictionary associates with each English word the syntactic information, definitional material, and references to the contexts in which it has been used to define other words. Such relations as class inclusion, possession, and active or passive actions are used as definitional material. The resulting structure serves as a powerful vehicle for research on the logic of question answering. Examples of methods of inputting information and answering simple English questions are given. An important conclusion is that, although LISP and other list processing languages ore ideally suited for producing complex associative structures, they are inadequate vehicles for language processing on any large scale—at least until they can use auxiliary memory as continuous extension of core memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an investigation in artificial intelligence, computer experiments on deductive question-answering were run with a LISP program called DEDUCOM, an acronym for DEDUctive COMmunicator. When given 68 facts, DEDUCOM answered 10 questions answerable from the facts. A fact tells DEDUCOM either some specific information or a method of answering a general kind of question. Some conclusions drawn in the article ore: (1) DEDUCOM can answer a wide variety of questions. (2) A human can increase the deductive power of DEDUCOM by telling it more facts. (3) DEDUCOM can write very simple programs (it is hoped that this ability is the forerunner of an ability to self-program, which is a way to learn). (4) DEDUCOM is very slow in answering questions. (5) DEDUCOM's search procedure at present has two bad defects: some questions answerable from the given facts cannot be answered and some other answerable questions can be answered only if the relevant fads ore given in the "right" order. (6) At present, DEDUCOM's method of making logical deductions in predicate calculus has two bad defects: some facts have to be changed to logically equivalent ones before being given to DEDUCOM, and some redundant facts have to be given to DEDUCOM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents news briefs related to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The association is making available to its membership and others, selected speakers' presentations on audiocassettes. This service is an extension of the ACM audiocassette program. The previous cassette programs are available upon request. With the addition of these 19 tapes, the complete library will cover over 40 topics in computer science and information processing, such as database, virtual memory and computer research. The service was designed to provide the members and others interested with a source of expert audio reference material. In another development, made possible by an ACM artificial intelligence award, the second "Computers and Thought" public lecture was presented by computer scientist Patrick H. Winston at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence held at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California in August 1973.

Discusses the significance of computer systems. Observation that in many fields, some were reluctant to move so rapidly into the new technology, while the younger members were extremely enthusiastic; Narration of the use of the office's computer terminal by the author's friend; View that computer systems are doing such fantastic things today that one does not need to claim tomorrow's achievements now.

The article presents information related to the upcoming events organized by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). 1969 ACM San Francisco Bay Area Technical Symposium will take place on April 18,1969 in San Francisco, California. Conference on Effective Use of Computers in the Nuclear Industry would be held on April 21-23, 1969 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee. Computer Workshop for Civil Engineers will take place on April 28-30, 1969 Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana. 24th ACM National Conference would take place on August 26-28, 1969 at San Francisco Hilton Hotel and San Francisco Civic Center in San Francisco, California. ACM Extensible Languages Symposium will be held on May 18, 1969 at Boston, Massachusetts. Association of Educational Data Systems Annual Convention would take place on May 6-9, 1969 at Portland, Oregon. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence will be held on May 7-9, 1969 at Statler Hilton Hotel, Washington D.C. ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing will take place on May 5-6, 1969 at Marina del Rey Hotel, Marina del Rey, California.