This manual is intended to be a guide to the philosophy and use of the programming language CONNIVER, which is "complete," and running at the AI Lab now. It assumes good knowledge of LISP, but no knowledge of Micro-Planner, in…

How does a person answer questions about children's stories? For example, consider 'Janet wanted Jack's paints. She looked at the picture he was painting and said 'Those paints make your picture look funny.' The question to ask is 'Why did…

A system for visual recognition is described, with implications for the general problem of representation of knowledge to assist control. The immediate objective is a computer system that will recognize objects in a visual scene, specifically hammers. The computer receives…

The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory proposes to continue its work on a group of closely interconnected projects, all bearing on questions about how to make computers able to use more sophisticated kinds of knowledge to solve difficult problems. This proposal explains…

How can we construct a program that will understand stories that children would understand? By understand we mean the ability to answer questions about the story. We are interested here with understanding natural language in a very broad area. In…

The idea of building a programmer is very seductive in that it holds the promise of massive bootstrapping and thus ties in with many ideas about learning and teaching. I will avoid going into those issues here. It is necessary,…

One very useful idea in AI research has been the notion of an explicit model of a problem situation. Procedural deduction languages, such as PLANNER, have been valuable tools for building these models. But PLANNER and its relatives are very…

This thesis confronts the nature of the process of learning an intellectual skill, the ability to solve problems efficiently in a particular domain of discourse. The investigation is synthetic; a computational performance model, HACKER, is displayed. Hacker is a computer…

Evaluation of public programming currently tends toward plans that are set in advance of any sampling and adhered to throughout. Because increments in the knowledge profile during the course of an evaluation might beckon adjustment of the working procedure, fixed…

The activity of designing and developing large, complex, discrete, physical, and engineered products faces the challenges in the physical product system, the organization of people, and the larger systems in which the product resides-the natural and societal systems. This thesis…