In the traditional small community, people learned how to maintain their own homes by watching activities in which the elements of their physical environment were made. This work was done out in the open, where everyone could see it as…

Reasoning about motion is an important part of our commonsense knowledge, involving fluent spatial reasoning. This work studies the qualitative and geometric knowledge required to reason in a world that consists of balls moving through space constrained by collisions with…

Evaluation of public programming currently tends toward plans that are set in advance of any sampling and adhered to throughout. Because increments in the knowledge profile during the course of an evaluation might beckon adjustment of the working procedure, fixed…

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…