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…

TYPICAL is a package for describing and making automatic inferences about a broad class of SCHEME predicate functions. These functions, called types following popular usage, delineate classes of primitive SCHEME objects, composite data structures, and abstract descriptions. TYPICAL types are…

This report describes a computer system that creates simple computer animation in response to high-level, vague, and incomplete descriptions of films. It makes its films by collecting and evaluating suggestions from several different bodies of knowledge. The order in which…

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 describes a system which maintains canonical expressions for designators under a set of equalities. Substitution is used to maintain all knowledge in terms of these canonical expressions. A partial order on designators, termed the better-name relation, is used…

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 report is concerned with the problem of achieving flexibility (additivity, modularity) and efficiency (performance, expertise) simultaneously in one AI program. It deals with the domain of elementary electronic circuit design. The proposed solution is to provide a deduction-driven problem…

The report describes a recognition system called GROPER, which performs grouping by using distance and relative orientation constraints that estimate the likelihood of different edges in an image coming from the same object. The thesis presents both a theoretical analysis…

I present a novel design methodology for the synthesis of automatic controllers, together with a computational environment---the Control Engineer's Workbench---integrating a suite of programs that automatically analyze and design controllers for high-performance, global control of nonlinear systems. This work demonstrates…

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…