William F. Clocksin – författare

This SpringerBrief is a computational study of significant concerns and their role in forming long-term relationships between intelligent entities. Significant concerns include attitudes, preferences, affinities, and values that are held to be highly valued and meaningful: The means through which a person may find deeply held identity, purpose, and transformation. Significant concerns always engage the emotions and senses in a way that simply holding an opinion may or may not. For example, experiencing a significant concern may provoke deep feelings of awe and wonder in a way that deciding what to have for lunch probably does not, even if the lunch decision involves a rich array of preferences and values. Significant concerns also include what Emmons has called ultimate concerns.The author builds upon this base by considering the hypothetical case of intelligence in androids. An android is defined as a human-like robot that humans would accept as equal to humans in how theyperform and behave in society. An android as defined in this book is not considered to be imitating a human, nor is its purpose to deceive humans into believing that it is a human. Instead, the appropriately programmed android self-identifies as a non-human with its own integrity as a person. Therefore, a computational understanding of personhood and how persons – whether human or android – participate in relationships is essential to this perspective on artificial intelligence.Computational Modelling of Robot Personhood and Relationality describes in technical detail an implementation of a computational model called Affinity that takes the form of a simulation of a population of entities that form, maintain, and break relationships with each other depending upon a rich range of values, motivations, attitudes, and beliefs. Future experimentation and improvements of this model may be used not only to gain a wider understanding of human persons but may also form a preliminary cognitive model of the reasoning process of an android.

Originally published in 1981, this was the first textbook on programming in the Prolog language and is still the definitive introductory text on Prolog. Though many Prolog textbooks have been published since, this one has withstood the test of time because of its comprehensiveness, tutorial approach, and emphasis on general programming applications.Prolog has continued to attract a great deal of interest in the computer science community, and has turned out to be a basis for an important new generation of programming languages and systems for Artificial Intelligence. Since the previous edition of Programming in Prolog, the language has been standardised by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and this book has been updated accordingly. The authors have also introduced some new material, clarified some explanations, corrected a number of minor errors, and removed appendices about Prolog systems that are now obsolete.