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Date:Mon Oct 1 08:51:43 2001 
Subject:1978 Book available free online (Computer Revolution in Philosophy) 
From:Aaron Sloman See text for reply address 
Volume-ID:1011001.01 

[To reply replace "A.Sloman.XX" with "A.Sloman"]

I am posting this announcement to comp.lang.pop for two reasons

(a) Several of the people who are old pop11/poplog users (including some
former colleagues) may remember the 1978 book and may be interested to
know that it is now available online free of charge, having been out of
print for many years.

(b) Chapter 9, on vision, describes a system called Popeye which
explored a multi-layered architecture for perceptual systems in which
different levels of abstraction were processed in parallel with
interactions between them helping to constrain searches for an
interpretation of messy and ambiguous images.

The program was written in Pop2, a precursor of pop-11, and ran on the
Edinburgh University DEC-10 system to which we had remote access from
Sussex university.

I don't have the code any more, alas, unless it's on one of the ancient
magnetic tape reels lying under my bookcase which I expect can no longer
be read.

The Popeye project was killed off around 1978 because our request for a
further grant was unsuccessful, in part because the influence of Marr's
views on vision led most people to conclude that such bi-directional
perceptual mechanisms are not needed if you analyse natural images
rather than artificial images. I think the argument was mistaken and
caused AI vision research to take wrong directions for many years.
(A personal hobby horse. See talk 8 here:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/misc/talks/ )

Here are details of the book:

    Aaron Sloman,
    THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY, Philosophy, Science and
        Models of Mind,
    Harvester Press (and Humanities Press), 1978,

The book is available at:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/crp/

The book was fairly influential for a while, but has been out of print
for many years.

It now been scanned and converted to html. It proved necessary to redo
all the figures, for which I used the excellent TGIF package, freely
available for linux and unix systems from these sites:
    http://bourbon.cs.umd.edu:8001/tgif/
    ftp://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/tgif/

(Interestingly tgif saves its information in .obj files using the Prolog
programming language, so programs that understand prolog can generate or
modify such files.)

The book is offered to the AI and Philosophy research and teaching
communities partly as a historical document, and partly to invite
comment and criticism of the ideas therein, including the methodological
ideas (e.g. chapter 2 on philosophy of science explains why AI is a
contribution to deep science which extends our ontology, whereas most
psychology, which merely investigates correlations within an existing
ontology is shallow science. Of course there are exceptions: shallow
AI and deep psychology!)

Aaron
====
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk   (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/
FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html