Understanding LISP Programs: Towards a Programmer's Apprentice

Work reported herein was conducted at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research program supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and monitored by the Office of Naval Research under Contract Number N00014-70-A-0362-0005.Several attempts have been made to produce tools which will help the programmer of complex computer systems. A new approach is proposed which integrates the programmer's intentions, the program code, and the comments, by relating them to a knowledge base of programming techniques. Our research will extend the work of Sussman, Goldstein, and Hewitt on program description and annotation. A prototype system will be implemented which answers questions and detects bug in simple LISP programs.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Spaceborne VHSIC multiprocessor system for AI applications

A multiprocessor system, under design for space-station applications, makes use of the latest generation symbolic processor and packaging technology. The result will be a compact, space-qualified system two to three orders of magnitude more powerful than present-day symbolic processing systems

Knowledge-based systems in Japan

This report summarizes a study of the state-of-the-art in knowledge-based systems technology in Japan, organized by the Japanese Technology Evaluation Center (JTEC) under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation and the Advanced Research Projects Agency. The panel visited 19 Japanese sites in March 1992. Based on these site visits plus other interactions with Japanese organizations, both before and after the site visits, the panel prepared a draft final report. JTEC sent the draft to the host organizations for their review. The final report was published in May 1993

Floyd-Hoare Verifiers "Considered Harmful"

The Floyd-Hoare methodology completely dominates the field of program verification and has contributed much to our understanding of how programs might be analyzed. Useful but limited verifiers have been developed using Floyd-Hoare techniques. However, it has long been known that it is difficult to handle side effects on shared data structures within the Floyd-Hoare framework. Most examples of successful Floyd-Hoare axioms for assignment to complex data structures, similar statements have been used by London. This paper demonstrates an error in these formalizations and suggests a different style of verification

Exploring artificial intelligence : Survey talks from the national conferences on artificial intelligence

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Understanding linkages

Mechanical linkages are used to transmit and transform motion. In this paper we investigate what it means for a program to "understand " a linkage. Our system extracts its understanding by analyzing the results of a numerical simulation of the mechanism, finding interesting qualitative features, looking for symbolic relationships between these features and conjecturing a causal relationship between them. Our system is capable of understanding a variety of mechanisms, producing explanations very much like those in standard texts.

Initial Report on a LISP Programmer's Apprentice

This is an initial report on the design and partial implementation of a LISP programmers apprentice, an interactive programming system to be used by an expert programmer in the design, coding, and maintenance of large, complex programs