A collection of powerful ideas??cription, plans, linearity, insertions, global knowledge and imperative semantics?? explored which are fundamental to debugging skill. To make these concepts precise, a computer monitor called MYCROFT is described that can debug elementary programs for drawing pictures.…

This report concentrates on progress during the last two years at the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Topics covered include the representation of knowledge, understanding English, learning and debugging, understanding vision and productivity technology. It is stressed that these various areas…

This is a partial theory of thinking, combining a number of classical and modern concepts from psychology, linguistics, and AI. Whenever one encounters a new situation (or makes a substantial change in one's viewpoint) he selects from memory a structure…

What are the characteristics of the process by which an intent is transformed into a plan and then a program? How is a program debugged? This paper analyzes these questions in the context of understanding simple turtle programs. To understand…

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…

We have developed a method and prototype program for assisting two experts in their attempts to construct a single, consensus knowledge base. We show that consensus building can be effectively facilitated by a debugging approach that identifies, explains, and resolves…

This paper examines the issues and the solutions that have been studied in database (DB) integration research and tries to draw lessons from them for knowledge base (KB) integration.

This paper descries D-SCRIPT, a language for representing knowledge in artificial intelligence programs. D-SCRIPT contains a powerful formalism for descriptions, which permits the representation of statements that are problematical for other systems. Particular attention is paid to problems of opaque…

This report develops a conceptual framework in which to talk about mathematical knowledge. There are several broad categories of mathematical knowledge: results which contain the traditional logical aspects of mathematics; examples which contain illustrative material; and concepts which include formal…

The construction of expert problem-solving systems requires the development of techniques for using modular representations of knowledge without encountering combinatorial explosions in the solution effort. This report describes an approach to dealing with this problem based on making some knowledge…