Introduction to the COMTEX Microfiche Edition of Reports on Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie-Mellon University

ORIGINALLY IT WAS Complex Information Processing. That was the name Herb Simon and I chose in 1956 to describe the area in which we were working. It didn’t take long before it became Artificial Intellagence [AI]. Coined by John McCarthy, that term has stuck firmly, despite continual grumblings that any other name would be twice as fair (though no grumblings by me; I like the present name). Complex Information Processing lives on now only in the title of the CIP Working Papers, a series started by Herb Simon in 1956 and still accumulating entries (to 447). However, from about 1965 much of the work on artificial intelligence that was not related to psychology began to appear in technical reports of the Computer Science Department. These reports, never part of a coherent numbered series until 1978, proliferated in all directions. Starting in the early 1970s (no one can recall exactly when), they did become the subject of a general mailing and thus began to form what everyone thinks of as the CMU Computer Science Technical Reports. A famous aphorism of Lord Kelvin has it that, if you can’t measure something, you really don’t know much about it. I don’t know how appropriate the aphorism is for science, its presumed target. In fact, much of computer science is devoted to knowing things that are without numerical measure. But the aphorism does seem to apply to report series. Without a well-numbered series, with clerks slaved to mark off each publication, one by one, through the ages, it is only a question of time before no one knows the assemblage or its boundaries. Marvin Minsky, in his corresponding in-