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From: sts@ssc-vax.UUCP (Stanley T Shebs)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Reply to stan the leprechaun hacker
Message-ID: <437@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 18-Aug-83 15:31:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: ssc-vax.437
Posted: Thu Aug 18 15:31:18 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 19-Aug-83 12:55:56 EDT
References: <4253@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Organization: Boeing Aerospace, Seattle
Lines: 27

Actually trees can be expressed as attribute-value pairs.  Have had
to do that to get around certain %(&^%$* OPS5 limitations, so it's
possible, but not pretty.  However, many times your algebraic/tree
expressions/structures have duplicated components, in which case
you would like to join two nodes at lower levels.  You then end
up with a directed structure only.  (This is also a solution for
multiple inheritance problems.) 

I'll refrain from flaming about traditional (including logic) grammars.
I'm tired of people insisting on a restricted view of language that
claims that grammar rules are the ultimate description of syntax
(semantics being irrelevant) and that idioms are irritating
special cases.  I might note that we have basically solved the language
analysis problem (using a version of Berkeley's Phrase Analysis
that handles ambiguity) and are now working on building a language
learner to speed up the knowledge acquisition process, as well as
other interesting projects.

I don't recall a von Neumann bottleneck in AI programs, at least not
of the kind Backus was talking about.  The main bottleneck seems to
be of a conceptual rather than a hardware nature.  After all, production
systems are not inherently bottlenecked, but nobody really knows how
to make them run concurrently, or exactly what to do with the results
(I have some ideas though).

					stan the lep hack
					ssc-vax!sts (soon utah-cs)