Semantic information processing

Minsky, Marvin (1927-2016), ed. Semantic information processing. viii, 438pp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. 229 x 153 mm. Original cloth, dust-jacket (chip in lower spine, some small edge tears, light wear). Very good. From the library of Arthur L. Samuel (1901-90), pioneer in computer gaming and artificial intelligence, with his signature dated Sept. 1969 on the front free endpaper.

First Edition. This 438-page anthology, consisting primarily of Ph.D. dissertations on AI by Minsky's students at MIT, contains only 9 papers, including Minsky's 32 page introduction. It includes on pp. 33-134 the first published version of Bertram Raphael's SIR Semantic Information Retrieval, "on the logical representation of knowledge for question-answering systems." The second paper in the anthology (pp. 135-213) is Daniel G. Bobrow's Natural Language Input for a Computer Problem-Solving System or STUDENT. The remaining papers are the Ph.D. dissertations of Minsky's students M. Ross Quillian, Thomas G. Evans, and Fischer Black (2 papers). These are followed by reprints of McCarthy's "Programs with common-sense" and Minsky's "Descriptive languages and problem-solving (1961) and "Mind, matter and models" (1965). The first edition this anthology has an unusual erratum slip pasted to page 433.

This copy belonged to Arthur L. Samuel, an AI pioneer whose checkers-playing program, developed in the late 1950s, is considered to be the world's first self-learning program— "and as such a very early demonstration of the fundamental concept of artificial intelligence" (Wikipedia article on Samuel).