Welcome to the November 2004 Newsletter. I like Prolog, and have used it as my language of choice for various applications, including expert systems, analysing financial data, and teaching AI at Oxford University. My most recent project is an algebraic manipulation system for safe spreadsheet construction, to try and reduce

As work slowed down for the summer, and inspired by the thriving interactive fiction (IF) community detailed in last month's newsletter, I decided to spend more time on interactive fiction (IF) tools, so that's what this newsletter is about. In one sense, its a specialized application

Fantasy Games Adventure was the first computer fantasy game. It had all of the elements we see today in Nintendo and Play Station fantasy games, where the computer has a model of an environment and the player manipulates a character in the game, travelling from place to place, encountering various

Interactive Web-Based Experts Like all computer programs, expert systems take input, process it, and provide output. For example, an expert system might input symptoms and output a diagnosis; input customer requirements and output a product configuration; or input a robot's situation and output an action. In many cases

The February 2004 newsletter is really a companion piece for the January 2004 newsletter. January discussed fuzzy logic and its usefulness for control systems, and included discussions of some simple examples. This month's newsletter has the code used for the experiments in January. It is a fuzzy logic

Errata It appears for the past few months, my e-mail address has stopped working, so I apologize for ignoring any correspondence during that time. Seeing as it needs fixing, and our Internet guru advises using contact sheets. For those who asked for the prototype code for the disease interaction system

Rules Business rules is the current term for a type of knowledge that is knotty to automate. The type of knowledge it refers to is logical knowledge, as distinct from factual knowledge or procedural knowledge. Factual knowledge is exactly that, and it can very naturally be stored in a computer

I've been meaning to add code corners to the last few newsletters but hadn't found the time. So this newsletter will be all about building the types of AI systems discussed in the last few issues. In other words, this is an issue for those who

Middle East A classic story tells of blind men describing an elephant, each with his own ideas based on which part of the elephant he was touching. In my work providing software for educational institutions I get to touch the Middle East. I've recently touched, via the Internet,

As always, feedback is welcome. Reasoning about Uncertainty, Bayesian Belief Networks Certainty Factors The first expert systems were research efforts in the medical diagnostic domain. The researchers quickly found out that dealing with, and propagating, uncertainty was a critical issue for medical systems. Typically medical experts hedged their opinions with