Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming

Calendar

List of Topics

1. Additive systems

• Ideas
  • Generic operations
    • Additivity
    • Danger/paranoid programming style
    • Translucency
  • Language layers
    • Implicit and explicit features
    • Emulation
    • Embedding
  • Pattern-directed invocation
    • Rule systems
    • Term rewriting
• Applications
  • Algebra, calculus, differential geometry
  • Peephole optimization
• Implementation
  • Combinators
  • Continuation procedures
  • Dependencies and provenance
• Mechanisms
  • Arbitrary association
  • Interpretation
  • Compilation
  • Matching and instantiation
  • Unification

2. Searching

• Ideas
  • Separating generation and test
  • Amb and backtracking
• Applications
  • Puzzles
  • Games
• Implementation
  • Control of meaning of time
  • Concurrency
  • Indeterminacy
  • Memoization
• Mechanisms
  • Continuations
  • Dependency-directed backtracking

3. Propagation systems

• Ideas
  • The problem with expressions
  • Partial information
  • Constraints
  • Multiple inconsistent worldviews
    • Alternate sets of assumptions
    • Local consistency with global inconsistency
• Applications
  • Modeling
  • Electrical analysis/synthesis
  • Accountability, social structure models
• Implementation
  • Cells and propagators
  • Generic merge
• Mechanisms
  • Truth maintenance systems
  • SAT solving interleaved with computation

4. Push and pull

• Strict and non-strict
• Values and requests
• Underlying continuations