Programming in societies of behavior-agents is emerging as a promising method for creating mobile robot control systems that are responsive both to internal priorities for action and to external world constraints. It is ...

On June 24, 1981 twenty-five participants from organizations around the country gathered in MIT's Endicott House for the Second Annual Workshop on Distributed AI. The three-day workshop was designed as an informal meeting, ...

It is said that it is not wise to dabble in the Arts without care and caution, for the spell is at once subtle and dangerous: Look herein! For if you read carefully and closely, you can incant a Word of Magic, and the ...

The Requirements Analyst's APprentice (RAAP) partially automates the modeling process involved in creating a software requirement. It uses knowledge of the specific domain and general experience regarding software requirements ...

The Assq Chip lives on the memory bus of the Scheme-81 chip of Sussman et al and serves as a utility for the computation of a number of functions concerned with the maintenance of linear tables and lists. Motivated by a ...

We propose research into automatic program understanding via recognition of common data structures and algorithms (clichés). Our goals are two-fold: first, to develop a theory of program structure which makes such recognition ...

The automatic layout of unbounded n-ary tree structures is a problem of subjectively meshing two independent goals: clarity and space efficiency. This paper presents a minimal set of subjective aesthetics which insures ...

The programmer's apprentice (PA) is an automated program development tool. The PA depends upon a library of common algorithms (cliches) as the source of its knowledge about programming. The PA can be made more usable if ...

This paper considers two constraint systems, that of Steele and Sussman, and Alan Borning's Thinglab. Some functional difficulties in these systems are discussed. A representation of constraint systems using the description ...

This document is intended to describe the current design for computer programming language, Act-1. It describes the Actor computational model, which Act-1 was designed to support. A perspective is provided from which to ...

Simplifying assumptions — everyone uses them but no one's programming tool explicitly supports them. In programming, as in other kinds of engineering design, simplifying assumptions are an important method for dealing with ...

This research will develop a methodology for designing user interfaces for general-purpose interactive systems. The central concept is the presentation, a structured pictorial or text object conveying information about ...

Our common sense views of physics are the first coin in our intellectual capital; understanding precisely what they contain could be very important both for understanding ourselves and for making machines more like us. ...

The image display tool GROK provides a facility for displaying images on the black-and-white screen of a Symbolics 3600 monitor. It allows display of images and their manipulation through a special window it manages. Images ...

This paper is a manual for an implementation of Logo graphics primitives in Lisp on the MIT Lisp Machine. The graphics system provides: Simple line drawing and erasing using "turtle geometry" Flexible relative and absolute ...

This paper describes a system which automatically generates program documentation. Starting with a plan generated by analyzing the program, the system computes several kinds of summary information about the program. The ...

In this paper we survey the current state of the art on fundamental aspects of concurrent systems. We discuss the notion of concurrency and discuss a model of computation which unifies the lambda calculus model and the ...

On June 9-11, 22 people gathered at Endicott House for the first workshop on the newly emerging topic of Distributed AI. They came with a wide range of views on the topic, and indeed a wide range of views of what precisely ...

This paper proposes an interactive debugging aid that exhibits a deep understanding of a narrow class of bugs. This system, called Sniffer, will be able to find and identify errors, and explain them in terms which are ...

Two well known programming methodologies for artificial intelligence research are compared, the so-called pattern-directed invocation languages and the object-oriented languages. The features and limitations of both ...