December 1987 - Vol. 30 No. 12
Features
Generality in artificial intelligence
My 1971 Turing Award Lecture was entitled "Generality in Artificial Intelligence." The topic turned out to have been overambitious in that I discovered I was unable to…
Issues in the pragmatics of qualitative modeling: lessons learned from a xerographics project
The photocopier is one of the most complex machines because xerography involves many types of physical phenomena. ARIA is a qualitative simulation of xerography that is…
Variations on UNIX for parallel-processing computers
Porting a familiar UNIX environment to today's parallel-processing computers is challenging, but options abound.
The duality of database structures and design techniques
Attempting to pair database structures with database design techniques that seem incompatible yields some fascinating concepts about the world of database, including…
Economies of scale in computing: Grosch’s law revisited
Does Grosch's law apply in the 1980s? A look at the price and performance of computer systems concludes that there are no economies of scale in computing. Computer…
Self-organizing search lists using probabilistic back-pointers
A class of algorithms is presented for maintaining self-organizing sequential search lists, where the only permutation applied is to move the accessed record of each…
