Disappearance: A Backwards Waltz

Waltz of the chromosomes

cientists have discovered a new function for amyloid precursor protein (APP), a protein linked to Alzheimer’s disease. The finding may reveal how APP gets mixed up with the enzymes that make it go bad. APP has an evil reputation. The and secretases transform it into amyloidpeptide, a component of the plaques that riddle the brain in Alzheimer’s disease. Previous work by Larry Goldstein (Univesi...

WALTZ: A Strong Tzaar-Playing Program

Tzaar is an abstract strategy two-player game, which has recently gained popularity in the gaming community and has won several awards. There are some properties, most notably the high branching factor, that make Tzaar hard for computers. We developed Waltz, a strong Tzaar-playing program, using enhanced variants of Alpha-beta and Proofnumber Search based algorithms. After many tests with compu...

Remembering Dave Waltz (1943-2012)

David L Waltz, in Memoriam

tion after completing his dissertation in 1972 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT AI Lab). That dissertation created the field of constraint propagation by showing that constraints and a rich but simple descriptive system were sufficient to recover threedimensional information from a two-dimensional projection. Besides an education, Dave picked ...

A backwards view for assessment

Much artificial intelligence research focuses on the problem of deducing the validity of unobservable propositions or hypotheses from observable evidence.! Many of the knowledge representation techniques designed for this problem encode the relationship between evidence and hypothesis in a directed manner. Moreover, the direction in which evidence is stored is typically from evidence to hypothe...