DAI-List Digest Wednesday, 11 September 1991 Issue Number 53 Topics: MA Authorship? Please send submissions to DAI-List@mcc.com. Send other requests, such as changes in your e-mail address, to DAI-List-Request@mcc.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Sep 91 17:15:11 +0100 From: pat@computer-science.strathclyde.ac.uk Subject: MA Authorship? MA Authorship? ------------- I've just read Long Qiegang's comment in DAI-52. I think one of the problems we might be seeing here is that, as computer scientists etc., we like to cleanly catagorise systems into some sort of classification hierarchy. It looks like that "might" be possible if we take a holistic view of DAI, ignoring the spectrum MA <----> DPS. Realistically, I think, it appears that we might view the spectrum MA <----> DPS as being made up of points, where each point corresponds to a classification hierarchy. If memory serves me, I think I saw something in AI-Magazine that attempted to do just this (circa 1985?). Now might be a good time to update that report. What I think is important, and refreshing, is that this newsgroup has succeeded where others have failed (signal/noise > 1). (some of) The main players in this new field of research have carried out a worthwhile dialogue in front of us all. In my view they have allowed me to distinguish between MA and DPS. What would I like to see? I think it would be nice if someone said (in this newsgroup) "Okay, I will take the dialogue we have just had and produce a paper." That way the dialogue is made available to others, and we have an accepted terminology for future use. In its own right, I suppose, the creation of such a paper would be evidence of DAI. That is, the paper could be viewed from 2 perspectives. First, a record of the dialogue with its conclusion. Secondly, as an example of an existing distributed MA system within the scientific community (us, the way we work together). Patrick Prosser CS Dept University of Strathclyde