JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Bertram Raphael’s SIR: a Computer Program for Semantic Information Retrieval made a surprise appearance tonight. It was published/printed by the Clearinghouse for Federal Scientific and Technical Information, Defense Documentation Center, Defense Supply Agency, U.S. Dept. of Commerce, June 1964. (156PP+12PP, plus one page of biographical information on Raphael with a bibliography including his work on LISP, the last entry dated May 1964). It is an oversized some-sort-of-photomechanical production, and may or may not be a very early and influential paper in artificial intelligence–it seems as though there are several approaches to that determination, none of which I can pass judgment on.
This is the Ph.D. dissertation by Raphael (b. 1936), who had the great Marvin Minsky as thesis supervisor.