This thesis investigates what knowledge is necessary to solve mechanics problems. A program NEWTON is described which understands and solves problems in mechanics mini-world of objects moving on surfaces. Facts and equations such as those given in mechanics text need…

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 paper studies the relationship of Artificial Intelligence to the study of language and the representation of the underlying knowledge which supports the comprehension process. It develops the view that intelligence is based on the ability to use large amounts…

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…

This paper presents a version of frames suitable for representing knowledge for a class of reconition problems. An initial section gives an intuitive model of frames, and illustrates a number of desirable features of such a representation. A more technical…

This paper describes progress to date in the development of a system for representing various forms of real-world knowledge. The knowledge is stored in the form of a net of simple parallel processing elements, which allow certain types of deduction…

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…

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…

A theory of early and intermediate visual information processing is given, which extends to about the level of figure-ground separation. Its core is a computational theory of texture vision. Evidence obtained from perceptual and from computational experiments is adduced in…