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December 20, 1765

Professor A. C. Satterthx/aitComputing Center and Program in

Information ScienceWashington State UniversityPullman, Washington .7165Dear Professor Satterthwait:

Enclosed is a copy of a letter I just sent to BryanBremner with some new information about EPAM. EPAM willlive once more, I am afraid, I note in your letter thatyou expect to have LISP operational at Washington Statesoon. Perhaps it will he done by the time I get EPAMrunning in LISP.

Sincerely,

Edward A, Peigenbaum

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wWASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITYPULLMAN, WASHINGTON 99163

COMPUTING CENTER AND PROGRAM IN INFORMATION SCIENCE

November 8, 196 5

Dr. Edward A. FeigenbaumComputer Science Department>tanford University,tanford, California

Dear Professor Feigenbaum

Thank you for your full and frank letter about the situationon EPAM. I felt that the situation was probably as you haveoutlined it. This seems to be a normal and expectable situatiwith anyone carrying on research with computers. I imagineit is one of the hazards of such research.

We are in the process of investigating the introduction ofLISP here at Washington State. I expect that we shall have itoperational eventually. IPL-V is working on our computer andone of our students has carried on some original research withit. For my own research in linguistics I find COMIT extremelyhandy. I should investigate its possibilities for other typesof research in heuristic programming. My impression is thatit is an extremely general and flexible system.

An idea has suddenly occurred to me. As our IPL-V systemworks here, it might be of value to you as well as to Mr.Bremner to have your deck of EPAM 111 to see how it runshere. If it does work to your and his satisfaction, thatfact would be a good indication that the trouble at Stanfordis in the IPL-V system there. If it doesn't work here, thisfact would indicate that there is trouble in your EPAM 111program. All this assumes that our IPL-V system for the 709is essentially identical with your system for the 7090 andthat no other slips twixt submission and output have occurred.If you are interested in this aspect, Mr. Bremner willwelcome the deck and try it out here-hopefully to the mutualadvantage of all concerned. If you could send us the deckwith some test data, Mr. Bremner will be glad to run it andsend you a copy of the output listing(s) which you specify.Mr. Bremner is agreeable to this suggestion and will send youa follow-up note.

I want to thank you for your personal attention and help withregard to our problem here. I am looking forward to havine

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the opportunity of meeting you personally sometime

Sincerely yours,

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A. C. SatterthwaitAssociate Professor

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October 28, 1965

Professor Arnold C SatterthwaitInformation Science and LinguisticsWashington State UniversityPullman., Washington 9916j5

Dear Professor Satterthwait:

Thank you for your letter of October 1J and thank you very much foryour kind words about the book Computers and Thou.j^ht. I would liketo relate to yoxi frankly what the situation is here"with respect toEPAM and IPL-V.

I have not done anything with the EPAM model since I left Berkeley,more than a year ago, EPAM is not currently operating at Stanford.During this past summer we made a first cursory attack on the problemof getting IPL-V into the Stanford 7090 system. We got our IPL - 7090system fldff the RAM) Corporation system tape. Though IPL is nominallyin the system, it doesn't work correctly and we have not yet made asecond attack at getting it to work properly, since there is very littlecurrent use of IPL here. LISP is the lingua franca for non-numericprocessing at Stanford and current work being done on nry projects hereis being done in LISP.

In the course of trying io get IPL to work, I also tried to revive EPAM.This attempt was not

successful,

I haven't looked into the matter care-fully enough to decide whether the difficulties are in the EPAM deck orin the IPL I don't foresee my getting back to this problem in the nextcouple of months. Hence, EPAM is moribund for the moment.

There is an EPAM 111 deck from which an EPAM 111 listing can be made.There is no EPAM 111 manual which can serve as a road map to the code,and as a description of the SPAM information structures. In fact, thereis no very detailed writeup of EPAM 111 as yet. Such a writeup willprobably be completed by the end of next January. My experience in thepast has been that these documentation difficulties have proven to bean almost insurmountable barrier to a graduate student from another uni-versity attempting to do research on EPAM. The process of transferringinformation about EPAM to a graduate student has been successful forstudents at my own institution or for graduate students who were willingto come to my institution to work with me and get the information in aface-to-face way. Perhaps Mr. Bremner would like to do that. However,he would have to fight the two problems mentioned above; namely that

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Professor Arnold C. SatterthwaitPage 2

" IPL-V doesn't quite work, and that EPAM doesn't quite work. Perhapsif he comes here he can make them both work.

In any case, I would be willing to send him the raw deck or the rawlisting or both. Please let me know what your feelings and his feelingsare in this complicated matter.

I am sorry that EPAM is not cycling happily at present, and that there-fore I cannot be more helpful.

Sincerely yours,

Edward A FeigenbaumAssociate Professor of

Computer Science, andDirector, Stanford

Computation Center

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WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITYPULLMAN, WASHINGTON 99163

COMPUTING CENTER AND PROGRAM IN INFORMATION SCIENCE

AIR MAIL

Prof. Edward A. FeigenbaumComputer Science DepartmentStanford University

Dear Professor Feigenbaum:

In February of this year you werewhich I wrote you inquiring aboutmodel. You sent me what material

kind enough to answer a letterthe current status of your EPAMyou had on. it explaining your

status at that time and offered to send us a copy of the EPAMdeck after you got settled.

This fall one of our graduate students, Mr. Bremner, expressedcontinued interest in studying and possibly working with the EPAMmodel. I suggested that he write you personally to learn whetheryou could send an EPAM deck which he could use for intensivestudy. I would like to recommend Mr. Bremner to you as an ablegraduate student in psychology who has maintained a seriousinterest in the simulation of cognitive processes and particularlyin your EPAM model. If Mr. Bremner is to be able to do any workdirectly with your model, it is essential that he have the deckat your earliest convenience. I realize that it is imposing onyou by bringing the urgency of this matter to your attention butI am sure you are aware that a student ' s stay at a university isa relatively short- time affair. If there is any significant delayin the acquisition of source material for study, the studentfrequently loses the opportunity to study this material. Havingworked, myself, to a considerable extent in linguistic researchwith a computer, I am well aware that it may be impossible for youto meet our request and of a number of reasons why this may be so.If such is the situation, just a word to let us know will besufficient. Mr. Bremner will be appreciative of your problems andunderstand the situation.

In your February letter you asked about the state of operation ofthe IPL-V system at Washington State. We have been able to get itoperating satisfactorily here and I used it with success in ourcourse in artificial intelligence last spring. I would also liketo express my appreciation for your book, Computers and Thought.which I found a quite satisfactorygence and heuristic programming at

textbook in artificial intelli-the graduate level.Sincerely yours,

i:

Arnold C. SatterthwaitAssoc, Prof, of InformationScience and LinguistAC S : mmr

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October 13, 1965

Stanford, California 9^05

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February 18, 1965

Professor Arnold C. SatterthwaitWashington State UniversityComputing CenterPullman., Washington 99163Dear Professor Satterthwait:

Thank you for your letter of January 27th. I was intriguedto learn there was interest in work with the EPAM model at WashingtonState University. As you can see from the letterhead I have changedinstitutional affiliation and I am now with the Computer ScienceDepartment at Stanford University. As a consequence of this move,currently my research affairs are in a state of chaos. It willtake me a few more weeks to get straightened out to the extent thatI will be able to satisfy your request for an EPAM deck. There areadditional difficulties connected with this. First, there is no"working manual" of the EPAM program. The detailed knowledge ofexactly what the program does, and how to get it to behave for you, issomething that is known only to Simon, myself, and a few of the graduatestudents and it is transmitted by word of mouth to the next generation.Therefore, I anticipate that it would be hard for you to get off theground with respect to this program without detailed programmedinteraction. Second, I haven't done much work with the program foralmost a year now. Since the program is complex, lam no doubt wellout of context with the details of the program.

When I succeed in getting a little more organized let me thinkthrough the problem and make some decisions about what action to taketo help you out. In the meantime if you have any good ideas let meknow.

Do you have an IPL-V system operating at Washington State?

Sincerely yours,

Edward A. FeigenbaumAssoc. Professor of Computer Science

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WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITYPULLMAN, WASHINGTON 99163

COMPUTING CENTER

Dr. E. A. FeigenbaumCenter for Research and Management ScienceUniversity of CaliforniaBerkeley, California

Dear Professor Feigenbaum:

One of my students, a Major inin trying to construct a modelhuman goes through in learning

Psychology, is interestedto illustraite processes ahis first language. I have

recently read your article on EPAM in Computers and Thoughtand it has occurred to both my student and myself that thework you have done on this program might serve as a startingpoint for his own work. Would it be possible for you to sendus a deck of cards containing the program listed in yourpaper, "EPAM Information Processes and. Examples of EPAMInformation Structures," mimeoed on June 20, 1962. I pre-sume this is a working program.

It occurs to me that this program may be of interest toothers of my students in the course on artificial intelligenwhich I have been asked to give starting in February.

Thank you very much for any help you can give us in thismatter.

Sincerely yours,

LL^AJ £r.&J&AJ»>Arnold C. SatterthwaitAssociate Linguist andAssociate Professor ofInformation Science

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January 27, 1965