Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-tis!afit-ab!icc!cbaron
From: cbaron@icc.afit.arpa (Christopher T. Baron)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: System Level support for AI stuff
Message-ID: <465@afit-ab.arpa>
Date: 1 Aug 88 17:43:38 GMT
Sender: news@afit-ab.arpa
Reply-To: cbaron@icc.UUCP (Christopher T. Baron)
Organization: Air Force Institute of Technology; WPAFB, OH
Lines: 50

In article <37202@linus.UUCP> news@linus.UUCP (Robert Eachus) writes:
>>The mind reels under the number of ways system and user performance
>>could be improved.

>-- The mind also reels at the processor bandwidth required to actually
>-- improve performance by using a rule based engine to do all this.
>-- :-)  It might help on an 68030 machine, which really should have
>. . . 

I must disagree!  Most of the time when a user is interactivly using the
machine the processor is idling.  The extra cycles wasted while a user is
hitting keys or moving a mouse can be used by the AI routines.  Of course
the number of free cycles goes down as the number of background tasks 
increases.

Further, the AI routines need not be running at a high priority to provide
benifits.  For example, the disk allocation planner could be planning the 
next series of tracks/sectors to allocate during  the relativly long waits
between disk accesses ( I mean file loads or writes.)

Still further, the implication is that this system will be similar in 
operation to the many expert system shells on the market.  These shells
are slow for a number of reasons some of which would be eliminated by my
concept of the rule base.  The rule and fact bases would be compiled to
a non-text symbolic form, which would include pointers to all related facts
and rules.  This eliminates two of the current shell slow downs: text 
interpretation and rule-base search pattern matching.  One of the rule
base search algorithms such as Rete could also be used.

Making the Amiga into a lisp-machine is not my intention here.  What the 
mind actually reels under is the memory and processor space required to 
impliment Common Lisp on a micro.  I have used a Common Lisp SUBSET on a
PC with a 16 MHz 386 and 9 Megs of memory and it was pathetic!  Someone 
else will have to do that to the Amiga.  Scheme is much better and could
be implemented well on the Amiga.

In reply to Randell Jesup, Commodore Engineering.

I would love to write this thing ( or things ) but am going to grad school
right now...  I think this type of software should be supported at the 
OS level, ideally included in the WB librarys.  Failing that it should be
PD or at least shareware so that the maximum number of users can benifit from
it.  

=========================================================================
Chris Baron
The Air Force would be wise to accept my opinions but so far no luck.

cbaron@afit-ab.arpa
cbaron@galaxy.afit.af.mil