purplecat

I have heard from the reviewers about the revised version of your
submission to JAR. Based on their comments,
I am happy to inform you that your submission is accepted provided the
following comments in the report can be addressed. Please prepare a
final version and send it to me along with a letter explaining how you
have handled the comments in the report. I will then decide and forward
the final manuscript to the publisher of JAR.

I have been trying to get this paper published in this particular journal since before G was born. I'm not sure quite when I started referring to it as the "Albatross Paper". My boss will be pleased as well. He's not one of the authors, but he'd like to help me improve my publication record and so clearly feels that telling me at regular intervals to get on with rewriting/resubmitting/chasing the progress of the thing is a duty. I'm sure it's a duty he'll be glad to be relieved of.

At this stage the research reported in the paper (an adaption of an automated reasoning technique called Rippling to a more expressive logic) is rapidly reaching the status of historic interest only. But it has irritated me somewhat to see the people currently using the technique, grappling with same problems I did a decade ago, without being able to do more than refer them to a technical report for solutions.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/937.html.

I've this long list of things I've been meaning to blog about over the past few months. I recall making a rather drunken post from BundyFest at the time, but I thought I might try a more sober round up of the event. In brief, Alan Bundy, my PhD supervisor is 61 so we had a symposium to celebrate his 60th Birthday and the opening of the "Informatics Forum" - the rather fancy title of the new Departmental building created for Informatics in Edinburgh, after their previous department burned down in mysterious circumstances.

Alan has worked primarily in Automated Reasoning a field which, one the whole, I would say really took off in 1965 when Alan Robinson published "A Machine-Oriented Logic Based on the Resolution Principle". Alan Bundy started working in what was then the Metamathematics Unit at the University of Edinburgh in 1971 and this became a part of the the Department of Artificial Intelligence in 1974. It's worth remembering how young the field was at this time. Automated Reasoning was only 10 years on from its first major result (Robinson's Resolution paper mentioned above) and it was only 20 years since John McCarthy coined the term "Artificial Intelligence". So it's not surprising that Alan Bundy's early work also involved what are now considered separate subfields such as Machine Learning, Automated Software Engineering and Natural Language. At the symposium a number of his colleagues and students were invited to talk and they were spread across all these fields.

I would identify two major themes from the talks and panel sessions held at the symposium:

( What happened to Strong General Artificial Intelligence )

( Ontologies are the Grand Challenge )

Other interesting factlets:

Ewen MacLean wrote a Jazz piece based on rippling (probably Alan Bundy's most famous automated reasoning technique) which was performed by what, I gather, are some of Scotland's best Jazz musicians, at the reception. I don't pretend to understand how the music related to rippling though.

Everything was being filmed for posterity but that meant everyone taking the microphone to ask a question was supposed to identify themselves. Much amusement was thereby had every time Alan Bundy asked a question and started it by saying "I'm Alan Bundy".

Alan's PhD supervisor Reuben Goodstein was, in turn, supervised by Wittgenstein. I've always been rather pleased by the fact that, in PhD terms, I am a descendent of Wittgenstein and, of course, via Wittgenstien of Bertand Russell.

The most important thing Alan ever told me was that really intelligent people worry more about understanding things than looking stupid. Therefore they ask questions whenever they don't understand something. I'm not as good at this as I should be.

Achieved:

• Established that B. was well enough to get G. to school and can now walk without crutches. Re-assured that they won't starve before I get back I have stuck by my original plan to return home tomorrow evening.


• Talked to DA. This involved installing yet another version of emacs, a new version of proof general, three new versions of Isabelle and a new version of IsaPlanner and then patching the preferred configuration. Just got an email from DA asking rather plaintively if we could actually discuss research tomorrow rather than installation issues.


• Got IsaPlanner to perform a middle-out reasoning proof, but did this interactively and revealed a nice big search space. Agreed that since middle-out reasoning is a major part of MJo's thesis project she would look at the implications of handling the search space and I would carry on in interactive mode.


• Went to a talk on parallelising Computer Algebra - this won me a free lunch.


• Wrote a draft Blue book note on proof specification languages.

To Do:

• Integrate middle-out reasoning proof with a critic.


• Finish Blue book note.


• Get taken to dinner by group.