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Subject: Re: Botvinnik? (Stilman's Linguistic Geometry)

Author: Walter Faxon

Date: 01:36:37 04/07/03

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I spoke in haste.  Botvinnik's programmer (and C:SISP contributor) Boris Stilman
has written "Linguistic Geometry: From Search to Construction" (Kluwer, 2000).
A blurb from the publisher (http://www.wkap.nl/prod/b/0-7923-7738-9):

----------
Linguistic Geometry: From Search to Construction is the first book of its kind.
Linguistic Geometry (LG) is an approach to the construction of mathematical
models for large-scale multi-agent systems.  A number of such systems, including
air/space combat, robotic manufacturing, software re-engineering and Internet
cyberwar, can be modeled as abstract board games.  These are games with moves
that can be represented by the movement of abstract pieces over locations on an
abstract board.  The purpose of LG is to provide strategies to guide the games'
participants to their goals.  Traditionally, discovering such strategies
required searches in giant game trees.  These searches are often beyond the
capacity of modern and even conceivable future computers.

LG dramatically reduces the size of the search trees, making the problems
computationally tractable.  LG provides a formalization and abstraction of
search heuristics used by advanced experts including chess grandmasters.
Essentially, these heuristics replace search with the construction of
strategies.  To formalize the heuristics, LG employs the theory of formal
languages (i.e. formal linguistics), as well as certain geometric structures
over an abstract board.  The new formal strategies solve problems from different
domains far beyond the areas envisioned by the experts.  For a number of these
domains, Linguistic Geometry yields optimal solutions.
----------

Stilman proclaims LG to be a "new area in Artificial Intelligence".  He has
posted a good deal of material about it on the web, which you should probably
examine before you buy his very pricey book.

It may turn out that Botvinnik's computer-chess legacy has value after all.

-- Walter



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