Love Anyway

What's Good Software, Anyway?

A colleague heading a research group recently contacted me. The group had a piece of software that it was about to license out to a company. The software encapsulated the results of several years of work: some fancy algorithms for data manipulation. The company would take over the source code to maintain and evolve it. My colleague wanted to know what sort of “objectively testable guarantees” h...

Run Once, Write Anyway

Scheme is one of only a few languages with a concise specification and formal semantics. With such a foundation it should be easy to write portable code that, without modification, runs correctly on different Scheme implementations. Yet this goal has proved elusive – there are more than fifty Schemes and writing programs that are portable between even just a few of these implementations is tedi...

What Is AI, Anyway?

In this article, the scientific and technological goals of artificial intelligence, and a proposal of ten fundamental problems in AI research are discussed This article is an introduction to Scientific DataLink’s microfiche publication of the Yale AI technical reports In this context, examples of research conducted at the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project relating to each of the research pro...

Why read journals, anyway?

Here is the conundrum: if you are reading this editorial, then I am preaching to the choir. You already are someone who presumably finds value in picking up a journal—spe-cifically this journal—to read at least some of its content. Intentionally, or perhaps inadvertently, you have wandered over to the Editorial page. Depending on how well I do with my first paragraph, you may continue reading, ...

Whose Information Is It Anyway?