Knowledge programming in LOOPS: Report on an experimental course. The AI Magazine

Early this year fifty people took an experimental course at Xerox PARC on knowledge programming in Loops During the course, they ex-tended and debugged small knowledge systems in a simulated economics domain called Truckin Everyone learned how to use the Loops en-vironment, formulated the knowledge for their own program, and rep-resented it in Loops At the end of the course a knowledge competition was run so that the strategies used in the different systems could be compared The punchline to this story is that almost everyone learned enough about Loops to complete a small knowledge system in only three days. Although one must exercise caution in extrapolating from small experiments, the results suggest that there is substantial power in integrating multiple programming paradigms. KNOWLEDGE PROGRAMMING is concerned with the tech-niques for representing knowledge in computer programs. It is important in many applications of AI, where the problem