Teamwork, Edison Style

The Design of Edison

This paper describes the considerations behind the design of the programming language Edison (Brinch Hansen 1981). Edison is deeply influenced by the advances made by Pascal (Wirth 1971) and its successors Concurrent Pascal (Brinch Hansen 1975) and Modula (Wirth 1977). In my attempt to learn from these previous efforts and improve on them I had to focus on both the virtues and defects of these ...

Edison, Science and Artefacts

This paper contrasts the approach Thomas Edison used when dealing with his claim to have discovered a new force of nature, etheric force, to the approach he used to create successful inventions. It argues that he failed in this adventure into scientific theory making because an erroneous view of science led him to abandon techniques that made him America's most successful inventor. From this I ...

Edison the scientist.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Edison's invention of the electric lamp, one of many heralded accomplishments that brought him lasting fame. For much of life Edison enjoyed a popular reputation as a laboratory genius who personified the spirit of scientific discovery. Was he really a scientist, or only an inventor? His participation in the Draper Expedition to the solar eclipse of 1878...

Rival centennial casts new light on edison.

Naive Mechanics Comprehension and Invention in EDISON

This paper briefly reports on the current architecture and status of EDISON, a computer model being designed to . ( l ) understand natural language descriptions of mechanical devices and (2) generate novel device representations through heuristic strategies of mutation and analogy. The representational constructs in EDISON must support both of these tasks and include: goal/plan information, spa...