YTEX—pronounced why-TEX or oops-TEX—is a TEX macro package. YTEX provides both an easy-to-use interface for TEX novices and a powerful macro-creation library for TEX programmers. It is this two-tier structure that makes ...

Obviously synchronizable series expressions enable programmers to write algorithms as straightforward compositions of functions rather than as less comprehensible loops while retaining the significantly higher efficiency ...

This document is intended to be a guide to assist a programmer in modifying or extending the Lisp Puma system, the Puma PDP-11 system, or the Cougar PDP-11 system. It consists mostly of short descriptions or hints, and is ...

This document describes the operation of the Lisp Machine interface to the Unimation Puma 600 Robot Arm. The interface is evolved from a system described in an earlier paper, and much is the same. However, the under-lying ...

It is generally agreed that the unrestricted use of state can make a program hard to understand, hard to compile, and hard to execute, and that these difficulties increase in the presence of parallel hardware. This problem ...

Several approaches to the meaning and uses of errors in software development are discussed. An experiment involving a strong type-checking language, CLU, is described, and the results discussed in terms of the state of the ...

A theory of rational action can be used to determine the right action to perform in a situation. I will develop a theory of rational action in which an agent has access to an explicit theory of rationality. The agent makes ...

A flow graph matching algorithm has been implemented on the Connection Machine which employs parallel techniques to allow efficient subgraph matching. By constructing many different matchings in parallel, the algorithm is ...

Frequently, it is convenient to describe a program in terms of the normal situations in which it will be used, even if such a description does not describe the its complete behavior in all circumstances. This paper surveys ...

This note descends from a talk I gave at the AI Lab's Revolving Seminar series in November 1984. I offer it as an informal introduction to some work I've been doing over the last year on common sense reasoning. Four themes ...

I have implemented a simple "mechanical design compiler", that is a program which can convert high-level descriptions of a mechanical design into detail descriptions. (Human interaction is sometimes required.) The program ...

The Apiary is an abstract computer architecture designed for performing computation based on the idea of message passing between dynamic computational objects called actors. An apiary connotes a community of worker bees ...

We are building a mobile robot which will roam around the AI lab observing and later perhaps doing. Our approach to building the robot and its controlling software differs from that used in many other projects in a number ...

I examine the scope and causes of the spurious behavior problem in two widely different approaches to qualitative prediction, Sacks' PLR and Kuipers' QSIM. QSIM's proliferation of spurious behaviors and PLR's limited ...

Standard regularization methods can be used to solve satisfactorily several problems in early vision, including edge detection, surface reconstruction, the computation of motion and the recovery of color. In this paper, ...

I review three systems which do simulation in different domains. I observe the following commonality in the representations underlying the simulations: • The representations used for individuals tend to be domain-dependent. ...

This is a manual for complete beginners. It requires little knowledge of the MIT computer systems, and assumes no knowledge of the UNIX operating system. This guide will show you how to log onto the AI Lab's SUN system ...

We describe a simple geometric modelling system called Eight which supports interactive creation, editing, and display of three-dimensional polyhedral solids. Perspective views of a polyhedral environment may be generated, ...

BUILD is a proposed tool for constructing systems from existing modules. BUILD system descriptions are composed of module declarations and assertions of how modules refer to each other. An extensible library of information ...

There are many ways to find bugs in programs. For example, observed input and output values can be compared to predicted values. An execution trace can be examined to locate errors in control flow. The utility of these and ...