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Lotus - a Procedural Environment

University of British Columbia

Much recent Artificial Intelligence research involves procedural or executable representations of knowledge as an alternative to conventional static data representations, LOTUS is a purely procedural programming environment where variables can assume only executable values, and may be interrogated only through their execution. The LOTUS language is defined and proven to be universal. Design strategies and implementation techniques are developed which allow algorithms to be implemented as global self-modifying procedural networks. Such executable networks may be viewed as self-modifying interpreters which simply execute their symbolic inputs, A context-free parser is implemented in which the sentence to be parsed is really a LOTUS program which, when executed, parses itself. Attention is drawn to the initial conceptual difficulties presented by LOTUS. Possible extensions to the language which could make it more effective in other A. I. domains are discussed, and questions of synchronization requirements and parallelism are investigated. A LOTOS Manual and the complete MTS-LISP implementation of LOTOS are included as appendices.

Text

2010-02-11

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/20059

Computer Science

University of British Columbia

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