Omega is a description system for knowledge embedding which incorporates some of the attractive modes of expression in common sense reasoning such as descriptions, inheritance, quantification, negation, attributions and multiple viewpoints. A formalization of Omega is developed as a framework…

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…

This paper describes the connection memory, a machine for concurrently manipulating knowledge stored in semantic networks. We need the connection memory because conventional serial computers cannot move through such networks fast enough. The connection memory sidesteps the problem by providing…

A fundamental problem in artificial intelligence is obtaining coherent behavior in rule-based problem solving systems. A good quantitative measure of coherence is time behavior; a system that never, in retrospect, applied a rule needlessly is certainly coherent; a system suffering…

This memo reports the results of a case study into how children learn in the absence of explicit teaching. The three subjects, an eight year old, a ten year old and a thirteen year old were observed in both of…

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 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…

The actor message-passing model of concurrent computation has inspired new ideas in the areas of knowledge-based systems, programming languages and their semantics, and computer systems architecture. The model itself grew out of computer languages such as Planner, Smalltalk, and Simula,…

The work reported here lies in the area of overlap between artificial intelligence software engineering. As research in artificial intelligence, it is a step towards a model of problem solving in the domain of programming. In particular, this work focuses…