Re: [ontolog-forum] Marvin Minsky's original memo on frames

[Steven Ericsson-Zenith <steven@xxxxxxx>]

I would NOT define "available for access at once" this way (i.e., via production rules). I assumed, since there is a reference to sense, that in this case Fahlman is describing something that is impossible on current machines.

On Sat, Oct 11, 2014 at 11:49 AM, Obrst, Leo J. <lobrst@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This original definition of Fahlman's seems nearly equivalent (isomorphic?) to production rules in expert systems, perhaps with the agenda built-in (depending on how you define "available for access at once"), no?

By the way, I really liked Fahlman's NETL, back in the day.

Thanks,
Leo

>-----Original Message-----
>From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
>bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
>Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2014 11:59 AM
>To: [ontolog-forum]
>Subject: [ontolog-forum] Marvin Minsky's original memo on frames
>
>As Pat Hayes observed, this forum has been rehashing many ideas that
>have been kicked around in AI and related fields for a long time. One
>of the "oldies but goodies" is the term 'frame', which is now used for
>a very watered-down version of a much more complex and richer notion
>that Marvin Minsky presented in his famous AI Memo of 1974.
>
>Most people who talk about frames don't realize that the original
>definition was introduced in an unpublished essay by Scott Fahlman,
>who was a graduate student at MIT at the time.  Minsky adopted that
>word and quoted a large excerpt from Fahlman's essay.  He also
>quoted and related many other sources in AI and cognitive science.
>
>I recently happened to re-read that memo, and I was impressed by its
>relevance to the issues discussed in Ontolog Forum. That 40-year-old
>memo is still a good summary of many research problems today.  See
>the URL and excerpts below.
>
>And by the way, Fahlman's most successful ;-) innovation was the
>sideways smiley face:  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm
>
>John
>_________________________________________________________________
>____
>
>Source: http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Frames/frames.html
>
>Fahlman's original definition, quoted by Minsky:
>
>> Frame Verification: I envision a data base in which related sets
>> of facts and demons are grouped into packets, any number of which
>> can be activated or made available for access at once. A packet can
>> contain any number of other packets (recursively), in the sense that
>> if the containing packet is activated, the contained packets are
>> activated as well, and any data items in them become available unless
>> they are specifically modified or canceled. Thus, by activating a few
>> appropriate packets, the system can create a tailor-made execution
>> environment containing only the relevant portion of its global
>> knowledge and an appropriate set of demons. Sometimes, of course,
>> it will have to add specific new packets to the active set in order
>> to deal with some special situation, but this inconvenience will be
>> far less than the burden of constantly tripping over unwanted
>> knowledge or triggering spurious demons.
>
>Observation by the psychologist Max Wertheimer, quoted by Minsky:
>
>> If one tries to describe processes of genuine thinking in terms of
>> formal traditional logic, the result is often unsatisfactory; one has,
>> then, a series of correct operations, but the sense of the process and
>> what was vital, forceful, creative in it seems somehow to have evaporated
>> in the formulations.
>
>Minsky's opening paragraph:
>
>> It seems to me that the ingredients of most theories both in Artificial
>> Intelligence and in Psychology have been on the whole too minute, local,
>> and unstructured to account – either practically or phenomenologically –
>> for the effectiveness of common-sense thought. The "chunks" of reasoning,
>> language, memory, and "perception" ought to be larger and more structured;
>> their factual and procedural contents must be more intimately connected
>> in order to explain the apparent power and speed of mental activities.
>
>Minsky's closing paragraph:
>
>> I cannot state strongly enough my conviction that the preoccupation with
>> Consistency, so valuable for Mathematical Logic, has been incredibly
>> destructive to those working on models of mind. At the popular level it
>> has produced a weird conception of the potential capabilities of machines
>> in general. At the "logical" level it has blocked efforts to represent
>> ordinary knowledge, by presenting an unreachable image of a corpus of
>> context-free "truths" that can stand separately by themselves. This
>> obsession has kept us from seeing that thinking begins with defective
>> networks that are slowly (if ever) refined and updated.
>
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