Ever tried reading logical texts from the 20s or before (e.g., C. I. Lewis's Symbolic Logic)? Confused by the absence of parentheses and all the dots and colons? Here's Carnap's explanation of the notation (from Abriss der Logistik): 4 c. The Dot RulesThe dot symbols (. : :. :: etc.) replace the bracketing of propositions. … Continue reading Dots as Brackets in Formulas

50 years ago this summer, McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, and Shannon organized a summer conference at Dartmouth which turned out to be a milestone in Artificial Intelligence research. For the logically minded, this item in the funding proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation is perhaps most interesting: 4. Theory of the Size of a Calculation If we … Continue reading Dartmouth AI Conference 50 Years Ago

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Computability in Europe conference in the lovely seaside town of Swansea, Wales. Lots of interesting talks on all kinds of aspects of computation, including a number of talks on the (limits of) hypercomputation, a tutorial on proof complexity by Sam Buss, and special sessions on Gödel's … Continue reading Computability in Swansea