Much Learning is done by way of studying precedents and exercises. A teacher supplies a story, gives a problem, and expects a student both to solve a problem and to discover a principle. The student must find the correspondence between…

The next generation of artificial intelligence programs will require the ability to organize knowledge as groups of active objects. Each object should have only its own local expertise, the ability to operate in parallel with other objects, and the ability…

As advances in computer architecture and changing economics make feasible machines with large-scale parallelism, Artificial Intelligence will require new ways of thinking about computation that can exploit parallelism effectively. We present the actor model of computation as being appropriate for…

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…

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 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…

This report investigates some techinques appropriate to representing the knowledge necessary for understanding a class of electronic machines -- radio receivers. A computational performance model - WATSON - is presented. WATSONs task is to isolate failures in radio receivers whose…

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…

Nearly 2% of all live births are very premature (gestational age less than 32 weeks), and 50% of all new cases of cerebral palsy occur in survivors of premature birth (gestational age less than 37 weeks). Because of their underdeveloped…