Monday, June 28, 2004

Calories In Can Of Holsten Pils

Prolog computer programming: ASCII and Cobol

On Tuesday 22/06/2004, died in the U.S. Robert W.

Bemer, a pioneer in computer programming. Among his professional accomplishments have contributed count the instrumental in the establishment of the standard ASCII

1] [2 ] representation of information exchange, and development of the COBOL programming language

. On the occasion of his death, the daily El Pais
published in yesterday's edition 27/06/2004 A brief biographical note, translation of original text
published in The New York Times

, from which we extract the paragraphs that refer to Bemer work in the field of computer programming: Robert W.

Bemer, a pioneer in computer programming Robert W.
Bemer, an early computer programmers, who helped devise

ASCII, a system that remains in use to represent letters and numbers in [...] code started working with computers when doing engineering work on military aircraft for the Rand Corporation in California, in 1949. "There I met early IBM computers and fell in love with his technique. I knew I was done for the world of computers. This business was in its infancy, and programming was a job that hacíaa the measure, usually involved preparing machines for calculations made one at a time. Until 1958 there was published the first mention of the word as a term computer software. The software was not a separate activity, but simply something that had to pay to get the computers, which were then the size of a room, could make their work, "he wrote in a series of memories in your web page .

Bright, articulate and irreverent, Bemer seemed to fit exactly in the role during the early years programming crazy . Worked for aircraft manufacturers in California, until 1955, he joined the research department of IBM's programming in New York. There was no formal training for programmers, and for a time was Bemer recruiting manager.
Bemer played
an important role helping to develop a standard system for translating letters and numbers to a digital code that could be processed by a computer, known as American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII (acronym in English). Before
ASCII, computer manufacturers had their own systems for encoding letters and numbers, making it difficult or impossible to exchange data between machines from different computer manufacturers. A final fifties and early sixties, Bemer was one of the leading advocates and supporters of the standard, under the guidance of

American National Standards Institute (later adopted by the International Standards Organization). ASCII

was implemented in 1963, expanded and modified over the years [...]. Bemer firmly supported ASCII

, although the direction of IBM defended his own standard of coding. In 1962, Bemer left IBM to join the Sand's Sperry Univac division. In its way, the standard ASCII

world. the late fifties, Bemer played a role in another important computer standard, the Cobol programming language. The Defense Department wanted a common language Data management and accounting, and the result at the end of 1959 was Cobol, stands for Common Language Oriented Management. [...] As its name suggests, COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language ) was a programming language created in 1959-1960 , within CODASYL committee ( Conference on Data Systems Languages \u200b\u200b

)-sponsored since 1957 by the Department of Defense-US-for application in administrative tasks and accounting.

ease of reading, thanks to a syntax very close to the natural language expression in English, but is blamed for

COBOL language

be too rigid in its format of writing very long sentences, and not suitable for structured programming techniques ( Pascal and C, to name a few, are examples of languages \u200b\u200boriented structured programming ). Moreover, the high standardization adopted since the start of development, and the special attention of the proper language to express data structures [ 1] [2

], among other features, has allowed even today continue operating in the banking, commercial and business applications with 40 years standing, showing a remarkable solidity and stability, for once the problems that the so-called "year-2000

" (consisting on the problems of using two digits to store dates in older systems) involved in some cases, for operational and functioning properly. more about the language COBOL : [1 ] [ 2] [3 ] [ 4] [5 ] [ 6] [7

]

Wednesday, June 2, 2004

No Sew Fleece Scarf Tie

human consciousness and artificial intelligence

To break the long period of time without leaving anything written in these parts, and waiting, among other things, higher levels of inspiration, following are some articles and annotations I have called attention pleasantly recent weeks: Self Organizing Maps (for T. Germano, description of the application of artificial neural networks to display clasificacióny information.) Fuzzy Logic - Fuzzy Logic

(by Hector Garcia Kirai.Net

). A Prolog Introduction for Hackers (comment on Through the blogging-glass at

Prolog tutorial published in

kuro5hin.org ). How does a search engine? [ 1], [2 ], [3

] and [4

] (by Hector Garcia Kirai.Net ). timetabling problem (practical implementation of certain aspects of graph theory, A. Arranz Cuesta Ordonez and E. Guzman, Programming in Castilian ). Multi-Backpropagation Network: Concept and Modeling (Backpropagation network is one of the Well Known NN model. However, large network is too complex and Takes a long time to train in Generation5 ...";

).

George Boole (on Boolean logic

    , digital or binary, by Hector Garcia Kirai.Net
  • ).
  • As can be seen, a special place of mention in this short list, it certainly takes Hector Garcia, and at this point it seems pertinent to comment that it is very commendable so that has to address the issues that is usually on his blog ( Kirai.Net ), apart from those of character and interest maso less strictly personal and private, to know: fundamentals of computing, artificial intelligence and its applications, programming in general ... It'll note his remarkable effort to make accessible and understandable, for "ordinary mortals, such matters. In another of his notes, "
  • The Turing Test and Intelligent Computer
  • " addresses a topic which has traditionally raised, and should continue rising, much controversy and diverse opinions: basically, that which concerns how to define what might be called as true artificial intelligence , what are the defining characteristics, and an autonomous system, to see who is endowed with the properties and functions inherent to human intelligence (if it ever reached to know and understand all of these properties and functions, from a joint perspective) is those that express the nature and operation of cognitive processes, reasoning and learning that occur in the minds of human beings. In comments to this entry , we can read interesting opinions, and at this point I would make a reflection made by the English writer and critic David Lodge [1 ] [
  • 2
  • ] in the context of an interview published in the edition of the newspaper supplement Babelia The Country of May 1 ("In Defense of fiction, "basically deals with the importance of gender in the novel, fiction, as an instrument of representation of human consciousness, which varies according to different periods over time). Question the interviewer (Lourdes Gomez): "Do you think that consciousness is the software of the human mind?" and Lodge replied: "In the literary sense is good metaphor to describe consciousness. Another question is whether the human mind works like a computer. I think the computer is a type of brain rather limited. There are similarities in performance, but also important differences. Mainly in the connectivity of the human mind and the execution of simultaneous tasks. A computer can never replicate these characteristics despite what the experts assure us in artificial intelligence. Computers are much faster than the human brain, but I do not think intuitively be able to remove irrelevant elements of a function. We win at chess, but never in the decision-making requires an intuitive ability. " aside a reflection of both the Lodge, which in any case no longer an opinion, backed by the knowledge that if laid up in two years of study devoted to cognitive science, artificial intelligence and the phenomenon of consciousness, with an eye toward preparing your secret thoughts novel (Anagrama
  • , 2002, ISBN: 84-339-69893-8) the author explains in the interview, and without wishing to enter into great depth in regard to this issue, it is clear that hardly may transfer the characteristics of human intelligence and their cognitive processes to autonomous artificial system, thereby creating artificial intelligence, if not clearly understand the full functioning of these processes, and it seems Unless the scientific disciplines that deal with these matters (in respect to physical and chemical processes, such as those on the transfer and information processing) are quite far from reaching an optimal state of knowledge and "global" about the apparent complexities over which it was initially thought to approach its study of the human mind.

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Best Place To Get Waxed In Ottawa

Seminars

We echo on this occasion three citations in the field of conferences and meetings related to the programming
  • declarative / functional (in PDF ) and GICA, are to be held in the coming months: 1st European Lisp and Scheme Workshop
  • (Oslo, June 13, 2004)
  • "Lisp has a tradition of Fruitful Providing a basis for language design experiments for many decades. The structure of Lisp, including Common
    Lisp and Scheme as its major dialects of today, makes it easy to extend
    the language or even to implement entirely new dialects without starting
    from scratch. Common Lisp, with the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS), was
    the first object-oriented programming language to receive an ANSI standard
    at the beginning of the 1990's. It is, arguably, the most complete and
    advanced object system of any programming language, and has influenced
    many other object-oriented programming languages that were to follow."
    [ continúa ]


  • Colloquium
    on Implementation of Constraint and LOgic Programming Systems

    (CICLOPS 2004)


    "This workshop aims at discussing and exchanging experience
    on the design, implementation, and optimization of logic, constraint (logic)
    programming systems, and systems intimately related to logic as a means
    to express computations. Experience backed up by real implementations and
    their evaluation will be given preference, as well as descriptions of work
    in progress in that direction."

    [

    continúa ]


    The 14th
    workshop on logic programming environments

    (WLPE' 04)


    "The aim of the workshop is to provide an informal meeting
    for Researchers working on the tools for the Development and analysis of logic programs. This year we want to Emphasize two Aspects: on one hand we want to discuss the presentation, pragmatics and Experience of Such tools, on the Other One, we want to extend the concept of "logic programming" Environments to tools based Developer for Any Language on computational logic (constraints, integration of Paradigms, specification languages, ...)." [ continues ] From the first date (to be held we learned via Bill Clementson's Blog , "Bits and pieces

    (mostly Lisp-related) That I collect from the ether
    ") are available in PDF format

    , the papers (communications, presentations) received so far. As for the

    workshops (workshops, seminars)

    CICLOPS 2004 and WLPE '04 , said to be held under the 20th International Conference on Logic Programming

    (ICLP'04, 6-10 September 2004, Saint-Malo, France) organized by the Association for Logic Programming

    (ALP).

    Manuel Carro and José Manuel Gomez-Perez, two of the organizers and coordinators of the workshops framed in ICLP'04
    to just refer to, are members of the CLIP Lab

    ( The Computational Logic, Languages, Implementation,

    and Parallelism Lab), Faculty of Computer Science, Polytechnic University of Madrid, whose area of \u200b\u200bactivity focuses on general Logic Programming and Constraint Logic Programming
    ( Constraint Logic Programming, CLP) in particular. In this context activity, members of the CLIP Lab
    have developed the Ciao Prolog

    : "[...]

    logic programming environment and restrictions [...] is one of the systems developed
    by the CLIP group. [...] [...] is free software and is currently being used in business applications both in the academic environment [...]. Among the advantages offered by Ciao Prolog highlights its extensibility, which have developed many libraries that add significant functionality to the system, such as constraint solvers, concurrency, distributed programming primitives and intelligent agents, persistence, higher order, objects, interfaces to other programming languages, etc.. As examples we can point the library PILLOW , possibly the most used for interconnection between logic programming systems (and restrictions) and the WWW
    and LPdoc

    a automatic documentation generator for logic programming systems and restrictions, both distributed as software Free. " [ source] Most technical reports (Technical Reports ) produced by members of the CLIP Lab are available for consultation by them sorted interest area and production per year (formats PDF documents are and PS). Unless you are looking for a specific text, from which it becomes aware in advance on which case is more direct and quick search by year the most practical and productive is done through the management and research topic . More information on conferences and seminars co-organized by the laboratory

    the relevant page.

    Wednesday, April 7, 2004

    How To I Prevent New Shoes From Creasing?

    Declarative Logic Programming and Prolog + Schelog

    Schelog is an implementation developed by D. Sitaram it possible to combine pieces of code written in a programming style similar to Prolog (including the main features of this language such as backtracking or reverse, the unification, the court, denial, meta-logical predicates , etc.). Scheme expressions in pure or conventional (Scheme is a language derived from Lisp

    - see previous entry in which we referred to the latter) within the same application: Schelog is an embedding of Prolog-style logic programming in Scheme. "Embedding''Means You Do not Lose Scheme: You use Prolog-style dog and Conventional Scheme code fragments Alongside Each Other. Schelog contains the full repertoire of Prolog features, Including meta-logical and second-order ("set'') predicates, only Those Leaving out features more That Could Easily Be Done Efficiently and more with Scheme subexpressions.
    In Programming in Schelog

    Schelog syntax is the characteristic of Lisp / Scheme (basically consists of nested lists and indented, without commas, as indicated by parentheses, preemption of operation sign arguments, strings in quotation marks, etc..). As an example, below the portion of code needed to compute, recursively, the factorial of a number, in Prolog in the first place, and in Schelog second (recall that factorial of a natural number n is the product of all natural numbers from 1 to n ): factor (0.1): -!. factorial (X, Y): - X1 is X-1, factorial(X1,Y1),
                     Y is X*Y1.

    (define %factorial
      (%rel (x y x1 y1)
        [(0 1) !]
        [(x y) (< x 0) ! %fail]
        [(x y) (%is x1 (- x 1))
               (% Factorial x1 y1) (% is and (* y1 x ))])) Schelog can be considered as a combination between styles of programming paradigms represented by one hand Prolog (logic programming

    dialect of Lisp

    other Scheme ( declarative programming functional). "Programming in Schelog " is an introduction in which the said D. Sitaram addresses the syntax and programming through the implementation that we are commenting. On the other hand, this same author, " Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days " is a quick guide and introduction to the language Scheme. Finally, we recommend reading a general introduction, referring to the origins of language Scheme: Scheme : small is beautiful - A programming language ideal for teaching dence ( Carlos Coello ). This article was subsequently published (PS

    format compressed in a. Zip) by the author, with the same title and more extensióny deep in the journal Advanced Solutions
    ( numbers 39 and 43, now this publication appears to be unavailable online, although Internet Archive can find multiple copies ). This new extended version of "Scheme: small is beautiful ..." adds to the explanation of the historical and language development Scheme, an introduction, with examples, the essential features and syntax for use, major updates and extensions as well as a final consideration about its utility RESEARCH AND teaching in the field of programming languages \u200b\u200b("Scheme as a teaching tool.")