Word: xeroxes
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...industry was reluctant to switch to RISC. But the new crop of chips has made believers out of almost everybody. Sun, a company best known for its engineering computers, got into the chip business last summer when it began licensing a RISC processor to AT&T, Unisys and Xerox. MIPS, which introduced its second generation of the chips last month, supplies microprocessors to Tandem, Prime, and Silicon Graphics. Hewlett-Packard has built an entire line of computers around RISC technology...
Despite these gains, current systems operate within strict limits and too often behave more like idiots savants than experts. Second-wave systems as yet have no common sense or awareness of the world outside their narrow slice of expertise. At high-tech redoubts like Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in California, scientists are planning decision-making systems that will behave more like real experts. Example: an all-purpose electronic repairman that uses knowledge and common sense about electricity to diagnose any problem put before it. At Xerox and elsewhere, other scientists are examining the very foundations of artificial intelligence...
...Xerox, a leading U.S. manufacturer of copying machines, expert systems like RIC (for Remote Interactive Communications) are giving the first practical hints about what the second-wave revolution will mean. Employing the reasoning of a special Xerox team of diagnosticians, RIC reads data from a copier's internal instruments, senses when something is about to go wrong, and sends a report to a repairman, who can warn the customer that an imminent breakdown can be avoided by taking appropriate steps. Theoretically, Xerox copiers hooked up to RIC systems should never break down...
Others, however, are already thinking beyond existing technologies. Johan de Kleer, a respected knowledge-system designer at Xerox, envisions an all- purpose electrical diagnostician that would have specific knowledge, such as the various laws that govern electrical flow and conductivity. But it would also have the common sense to decide whether it was faced with a broken VCR or a broken computer. To build this system, de Kleer has spent ten years codifying what he calls "qualitative" calculus that will provide the language to build "common-sense physics." The problem with common sense is that it requires the computer...
...Cambridge, while we Quadlings can escape Harvard proper and take shelter in our pleasure resort hideaway. The studious Riverlings must run around from library to library, while we can find all of our reserve readings in Hilles (which has its own grille along with free juice, candy, and xerox machines). And River residents must trek to Hemenway Gym to play squash, while we can just cross the street to the QRAC. No wonder they're envious...