In the fall of 1981, a Japanese report officially initiated the quest for fifth-generation computers that would encompass the functions of knowledge processing and artificial intelligence. The conceptual underpinnings behind Prolog—Japan's language of choice for these activities—are presented here in a way that suggests why Prolog or a similar language might be considered a model for designing the computers of the future.
Computing Applications
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Discovering the secrets of DNA
Sophisticated software tools are becoming increasingly important in helping biologists understand how nature operates. Symbolic pattern-recognition and artificial-intelligence methodologies are contributing to the development of such software.
Modeling california earthquakes and earth structures
Seismology has burgeoned into a modern science—force-fed by federal funding to advance technology for detecting underground nuclear explosions and predicting earthquakes, and by industry to improve tools for gas and oil exploration. Computers, seismic instrument systems, telemetry, and data reduction have played key roles in this growth.
Computing in higher education: the Athena experience
Project Athena at MIT is an experiment to explore the potential uses of advanced computer technology in the university curriculum. About 60 different educational development projects, spanning virtually all of MIT's academic departments, are already in progress.
Toward the domestication of microelectronics
The great challenge for computer science in this decade is to make computers usable by everyone. Computers, long viewed as a dehumanizing force, will become the most powerful means of personal creative expression and communication ever known.
Growth of distributed systems has attained unstoppable momentum. If we better understood how to think about, analyze, and design distributed systems, we could direct their implementation with more confidence.
Pilots of the future: human or computer?
As more and more automation is incorporated in aircraft, the essential question becomes one of autonomy: Should the automated system serve as the human pilot's assistant, or vice versa?
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), now being planned at NASA, will require a prodigious amount of highly concurrent signal processing to be done in real time by special-purpose hardware.
The P2 algorithm for dynamic calculation of quantiles and histograms without storing observations
A heuristic algorithm is proposed for dynamic calculation of the median and other quantiles. The estimates are produced dynamically as the observations are generated. The observations are not stored; therefore, the algorithm has a very small and fixed storage requirement regardless of the number of observations. This makes it ideal for implementing in a quantile chip that can be used in industrial controllers and recorders. The algorithm is further extended to histogram plotting. The accuracy of the algorithm is analyzed.
Orthogonal Latin squares: an application of experiment design to compiler testing
Orthogonal Latin squares—a new method for testing compilers—yields the informational equivalent of exhaustive testing at a fraction of the cost. The method has been used successfully in designing some of the tests in the Ada Compiler Validation Capability (ACVC) test suite.
Systems programming with JSP: example—a VDU controller
The generation of an embedded microprogram controlling a video display unit demonstrates how Jackson Structured Programming can be used effectively for both systems programming and microprocessor applications.
DSS design: a systemic view of decision support
A systemic view of DSS can provide a concrete framework for effective design of DSS and can also serve as a basis for accumulating DSS research results.
A probability model for overflow sufficiency in small hash tables
For hash tables in which a strict physical separation exists between primary storage and storage for overflow records, with bucket capacity at least three, a complete probability model is described. A measure of hash table efficiency is introduced, called the table sufficiency index (TSI), and defined as the probability that the overflow space is sufficient assuming that the set of hashed keys has a uniform distribution. The constructed probability model may be used to compute the TSI for hash tables with parameters chosen from a restricted domain. The TSI is advocated as a tool for making decisions about the parameters of small hash tables.
Security without identification: transaction systems to make big brother obsolete
The large-scale automated transaction systems of the near future can be designed to protect the privacy and maintain the security of both individuals and organizations.
An expert system for a resource allocation problem
We describe an expert system for resource allocation in a particular military domain. The system incorporates variants of several important techniques of artificial intelligence and makes the first use of the Merit system for question selection. This technique enables the system to direct the acquisition of information by finding questions with a high ratio of probable importance to difficulty. In the current application, each resource is a military weapon, each task to which such a resource can be allocated is firing at a military target, and the objective function is the expected reduction in value of targets. The coefficients that relate a particular resource to a particular task are not provided explicitly. Instead, in the first phase of the allocation process, the system uses a computation network to determine the effectiveness of each individual weapon against each prospective target. The network, built by a domain expert in advance, allows reasoning with logical, Bayesian, and expert-defined operators. After the calculation of individual effectiveness values, portions of an allocation tree are constructed to determine good allocation plans for the set of weapons. The individual effectiveness values are used to direct the traversal and pruning of the allocation tree.
Concepts of the text editor Lara
Lara, a text editor developed for the Lilith workstation, exemplifies the principles underlying modern text-editor design: a high degree of interactivity, an internal data structure that mirrors currently displayed text, and extensive use of bitmap controlled displays and facilities.
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