Freud's theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental "censors" that make it hard for us to think "forbidden" thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay…

This paper describes an approach to supporting work in the office. Using and extending ideas from the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) we describe office work as a problem solving activity. A knowledge embedding language called Omega is used to…

This thesis is based on the premise that small nations face unique challenges in the quest for economic prosperity. They have a small domestic economy and are more dependent than larger economies on international trade. Smallness typically entails a lack…

Webster P. Dove., Originally presented as author's thesis (Ph. D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 1986., Bibliography: p. 209-213., Supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency monitored by ONR under contract no. N00014-81-K-0742 Supported in part by the National Science…

In recent years we have seen a confluence of science and technology that portends great impact to business strategy and product development. Just as physicists, chemists and biologists have extended their knowledge to other fields in pursuit of their own…

If we are to understand human-level intelligence, we need to understand how meanings can be learned without explicit instruction. I take a step toward that understanding by focusing on the symbol-grounding problem, showing how symbols can emerge from a system…

A program, some TECO macros, and some small modifications to existing systems software have been written, called PRO, whose purpose is to reduce the large number of control languages and system programs it has been necessary to know about and…

This reference manual consists of two parts. The first (sections 1 through 6) is intended for those who are either interested in the ITS 1.5 time sharing monitor for its own sake or who wish to write machine language programs…

The paper advocates the need for systems which support maintenance of LISP-type data bases, and describes an experimental system of this kind, call DABA. In this system, a description of the data base's structure is kept in the data base…

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…