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 ...

In a parallel machine with many thousands of processors the routing of information between processors is a key task, which turns out to require as much hardware and perhaps more sophistication than local computing itself. ...

This paper proposes an editing tool named TEMPEST (TEMPlate Editor for Structured Text) whose goal is to extend a text editing environment by using templates to incorporate into it some knowledge of the structure of the ...

The problem of automatically improving the performance of computer programs has many facets. A common source of program inefficiency is the use of abstraction techniques in program design: general tools used in a specific ...

The design of a program is rarely a straightforward mapping from the problem solution to the code. More frequently, fragments of high level concepts are distributed over one or more modules such that it is hard to identify ...

Molecular biologists use a variety of models when they predict the behavior of genetic systems. A discrete model of the behavior of individual macromolecular elements forms the foundation for their theory of each system. ...

This document is a draft copy of a portion of the Lisp Machine window system manual. It is being published in this form now to make it available, since the complete window system manual is unlikely to be finished in the ...

An iterative method of using occluding boundary information is proposed to compute surface slope from shading. We use a stereographic space rather than the more commonly used gradient space in order to express occluding ...

The research reported here concerns the principles used to automatically generate three-dimensional representations from line drawings of scenes. The computer programs involved look at scenes which consist of polyhedra and ...

Recognition of polyhedra by a heterarchical program is presented. The program is based on the strategy of recognizing objects step by step, at each time making use of the previous results. At each stage, the most obvious ...

This paper describes BUILD, a computer program which generates plans for building specified structures out of simple objects such as toy blocks. A powerful heuristic control structure enables BUILD to use a number of ...