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From: EDWARDS@WARBUCKS.AI.SRI.COM (Douglas Edwards)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Reworking Lenat
Message-ID: <561915335.0.EDWARDS@WARBUCKS.AI.SRI.COM>
Date: Thu, 22-Oct-87 11:35:35 EST
Article-I.D.: WARBUCKS.561915335.0.EDWARDS
Posted: Thu Oct 22 11:35:35 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Oct-87 22:47:24 EST
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Organization: The ARPA Internet
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Approved: ailist@kl.sri.com

The claim that Lenat's work has not been retested should not be
allowed to pass without being questioned.  Not only should Weimin
Shen's work, already cited by Tom Dietterich, be taken into account,
but there is apparently another attempt to work with the same approach
going on at MIT.  *Artificial Intelligence Abstracts* cites the MIT AI
Memo AIM-898, "Discovery Systems" by K. W. Haase Jr. (*AI Abstracts*,
volume 1 number 1, January 1987).  I have not yet read (or even
obtained) this memo, but the abstract suggests that Haase has not only
reimplemented Lenat's work but also tried to discover a principled
explanation for why it works, and that Haase's explanation for AM's
success would be quite different from Dietterich's and Shen's.  I look
forward to learning more about Haase's work.  I don't know if Haase
reads AILIST; if he does, it would be interesting to hear his own
comments on the AM controversy.

--- Douglas D. Edwards
(edwards@ai.sri.com)

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