Pergamon

Engng Applic. Artif. lntell. Vol. 8, No. 3, p. 365, 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd. Printed in Great Britain

Book Review

Prime Time Freeware for AI, by Mark Kantrowitz. Prime Time Freeware, Sunnyvale, CA, U.S.A. (1994). 220 pp. $60. ISBN: 1-881957-11-X.

This volume is a significant piece of AI publishing. This is not because it is a literary masterpiece-- i ts 220 pages are essentially a listing of program names - -bu t because it contains inside its back cover two CD-ROMs with 5 gigabits of compressed AI software and documents.

The software is from the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) AI repository, which contains much of the best free AI software that is available world-wide. All of the software is available on-line at CMU, and some of it would also be available from other sites on the Net. The advantage of this book is that it makes all of this material available to researchers in the comfort of their own computers, irrespective of whether they are Net-connected, and with less hassle.

The CD-ROMs are in ISO format, and so should be readable on a wide range of computers. A directory of compression and archiving tools for different machines has thoughtfully been included, so it should prove possible to unpack the compressed software on a VAX or a PC or a Mac or a Sun.

Not all of the 5 gigabytes of AI-related material will be equally interesting to every reader, and so it makes sense to outline the main features of the CD-ROMs.

Firstly, there is a good deal of documentat ion about different aspects of AI. There are bibliographies and documents about: artificial life, cellular automata, con- straint logic programming, data mining, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, machine learning, neural networks and natural-language programming. Someone investi- gating any of these areas would find the material on the disk invaluable as a starting place for their research.

The second way that the CD-ROMs could be of use to someone interested in AI is by providing an AI language system for them to use. The CD-ROMs con- tain public-domain versions of Common Lisp, OPS5, ML, Prolog and Smalltalk. Perhaps the most significant of these systems is CLIPS. CLIPS is a knowledge

engineering toolkit built by NASA, with good docu- mentation, and features similar to those of some fairly expensive toolkits (apart from the user interface). It runs on several systems, including Mac, PC and Sun, and has been used by NASA to build serious appli- cations. If CLIPS is of use, then the book is easily worth the money for that alone.

Finally, the CD-ROMs have many pieces of software that illustrate AI ideas in a particular area. The follow- ing is a somewhat arbitrary list, but illustrates the kind of material that is provided:

• Blackboard systems: the University of Michigan blackboard system GBB.

• Fuzzy-logic tools: the CD-ROMs contain demos of several of the available fuzzy-logic toolkits, and some simple freeware systems.

• Qualitative reasoning: two of the major systems (QPE and QSIM) are present on the CD-ROMs, including all of the documentat ion and examples.

• Genetic algorithms and genetic programming: many useful packages give a head start in this area.

• Representation and reasoning systems: the CD- ROMs contain SOAR, Babylon, Agent0 and the Generic Tasks Toolkit , along with many other systems described in the AI literature.

The list above includes several pieces of software which in the past could only be obtained by writing to the authors and arranging for tapes to be sent. This would mean worrying about tape format and about what command was used to unload the files. It was a significant cost and effort, both for the potential user and for the authors of the packages. By making such packages freely available on the Net, and available to the wider AI community on CD-ROM at low cost, CMU, Kantrowitz and Prime Time Freeware have provided a very valuable service.

CHRIS PRICE University of Wales, Aberystwyth, U.K.

CALL FOR REVIEWERS

Suitably qualified readers interested in joining the panel of book reviewers for Engineering Applications of Artifurial Intelligence should write,

giving a brief curriculum vitae and an indication of their fields of interest, to:

The Book Review Editor, EA,4/, Dr C.J. Price Department of Computer Science, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Dyfed SY23 3DB, UK

Telephone: + 44 (1970) 622 444; Fax: + 44 (1970) 622 455; emaii: cjp@aber.ac.uk

Note: No fee is payable to reviewers; however, the books reviewed become their property.

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