On 07/04/2009 19:40, Rich Alderson wrote:
Marvin Minsky was never at SAIL (in the academic
sense--he probably did
visit at one time or another). His career was all at MIT;
Yup, I'm not sure why I typed that! Probably thinking of another paper
by someone else.
Also, I think you are confusing the koan about Moon
and the student who
discovers reference-counting garbage collection, and the koan about
Minsky's response to Sussman's random wiring of a neural net.
No, I'm not confusing them. Minsky wrote the GC I was thinking of, and
some papers about it, but the koan is indeed related in connection with
Moon.
Garbage collection is in point of fact so nontrivial
that many papers on
the topic were published in CACM, JACM, and other ACM and IEEE pubs in
the 60s, 70s and into the 80s. I read most of them when I was into LISP implementation.
I read a few. The further into it you get, the harder it seems, sometimes!
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York