In recent years, researchers in artificial intelligence have become interested in replicating human physical reasoning talents in computers. One of the most important skills in this area is predicting how physical systems will behave. This thesis discusses an implemented program…

This paper describes a system for the computer understanding of English. The system answers questions, executes commands, and accepts information in normal English dialog. It uses semantic information and context to understand discourse and to disambiguate sentences. It combines a…

How can we insure that knowledge embedded in a program is applied effectively? Traditionally the answer to this question has been sought in different problem solving paradigms and in different approaches to encoding and indexing knowledge. Each of these is…

All intelligence relies on search --- for example, the search for an intelligent agent's next action. Search is only likely to succeed in resource-bounded agents if they have already been biased towards finding the right answer. In artificial agents, the…

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…

This thesis describes some aspects of a computer system for doing medical diagnosis in the specialized field of kidney disease. Because such a system faces the spectre of combinatorial explosion, this discussion concentrates on heuristics which control the number of…

(cont.) as well, firms have an incentive to require coordinated investments in technology across the enterprise. Still, research in IS has also highlighted the fact that the productivity of computer investments is highly dependent on co-investment in complementary assets (for…

This is a reprint of page proofs of Chapter 12 of Perceptrons, M. Minsky and S. Papert, MIT Press 1968, (we hope). It replaces A.I. Memo No. 156 dated March 1968. The perceptron and convergence theorems of Chapter 11 are…

How much information about the shape of an object can be inferred from its image? In particular, can the shape of an object be reconstructed by measuring the light it reflects from points on its surface? These questions were raised…

This paper demonstrates that it is possible to generate a reasonably accurate coordinate system on randomly distributed processors, using only local information and local communication. By coordinate systems we imply that each element assigns itself a logical coordinate that maps…