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The article reports on research which was conducted to investigate papers which were submitted to conferences of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) between 1996 and 2009 and to evaluate trends and influences on women’s authorship of computing-conference papers. Researchers found that the number of ACM conference papers grew from 1966 to 2009. They also found that while women remain severely underrepresented in computing, there was a substantial increase in their share of papers that they published. They concluded that the increase may be due to the fact that women earned more Ph.D. degrees in computing.

This article discusses system crashes and how each level of the system needs to be implemented correctly and the system component interfaces need to be used correctly by applications in order to prevent crashes. Several papers are cited within this article exploring the file system, a lower level component within the system, an exploration of interface-level guarantees with bug-finders, crash-consistent programs, and how the newer concept of persistent memory interacts with system crashes.

Announces the need for research papers for presentation in upcoming events about computing in 1991. Titles of the events; Venues and dates.

The effective operation of free enterprise in creating the envisioned information service industry is dependent upon three accomplishments: (1) the restructuring of our information processing industry so that a clear division of costs is mode among computing, communications, and the development of information services; (2) the wide use of multiaccess system concepts so that information services may share in the use of computer installations and so that the cost of their construction is reasonable; and (3) the development of public, message-switched communications services so that adequate provisions are made for Information security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the proposed American Standard, "Eleven-Sixteenths Inch Perforated Paper Tape." This standard covers the physical dimensions of the paper tape and its perforations. This standard is for perforated paper tape with fully punched round holes. The punched tape shall have an overall width of 0.686 inch plus or minus 0.003 inch after the tape has been conditioned to within 69.5 degrees F to 76.5 degrees F and 48 percent to 52 percent relative humidity for a period of 24 hours. The tape shall be used for recording up to five levels of information across the tape. The feed holes in the tape shall be fully punched and round with a diameter of 0.046 inch plus 0.002 minus 0.001 inch. All holes punched in the tape shall nominally center on the true intersection of longitudinal and perpendicular transverse center lines spaced 0.100 inch apart. Tolerances on locations of code holes in any one transverse row, relative to the center lines of the feed hole in that row, shall be plus or minus 0.002 inch in the transverse direction and plus or minus 0.003 inch in the longitudinal direction.

The article presents information on various events related to the field of computers and computing. "The 1985 ACM Thirteenth Annual Computer Science Conference," is to be held during March 12-14, 1985, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Highlights include a professional program organized around three theme days, exhibits, the finals of the ACM International Scholastic Programming Contest, the Annual Employment Register, the conference luncheon, a special luncheon for department chairpersons, and several social functions. Besides, "The ACM/IEEE-CS Workshop on High Performance Transaction Systems" is to be held during September 23-25, 1985, in Pacific Grove, California. Participation is by invitation only, and attendance is to be limited to 50 participants. Each participant is expected to actively contribute to the workshop by submitting a position paper, an extended abstract, or a full paper.

The article presents information regarding the latest trends in computers as of January 2004. There is a legal hassle for the first generation of widespread and regular computer users who grow older. Legal experts in estate and probate matters agree that anything stored on a computer is considered "intangible" property, meaning it is probably worth more than the tangible property it occupies. The University of Michigan researchers are of the opinion that spammers should be charged for every message they send and the spam problem will disappear soon. The sneaker market is going to get a boom with the arrival of smart shoes, which are able to sense, calculate, and adapt to its physical environment in real time. The Chinese market continues to shun established protocols, electing instead to create its own. The countries of the world have invested heftily to provide citizens with a digital means for accessing services. Where humans use stereoscopic vision, hand dexterity, and sensory information from their fingertips to perform the intricate art of paper folding, a machine handles the task in a far different way.

The article reports that the tenth annual George E. Forsythe Award is being presented to two winning papers this year: "An Empirical Study of Insertion and Deletion in Binary Search Trees" by Jeffrey L. Eppinger of Carnegie-Mellon University and "Optimal Paths in Graphs with Stochastic or Multidimensional Weights" by Ronald Prescott Loui of Harvard. The competition memorializes George E. Forsythe, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) President 1964-1966 and leader in the development of Computer Science as a separate discipline. This tenth competition was coordinated by a committee of graduate students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with C.L. Liu as faculty advisor, James Peterson, Carl Uhrik, and Norman Josephson were cochairmen of the student judging and refereeing committee.

The newly formed U.S.-based Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Activities Committee is working with the editors of Computing Surveys to provide an exciting publishing venue for students - the Computing Surveys Student Tutorial Paper Contest. This contest provides an excellent opportunity for students to develop their writing and tutorial skills. Papers should be substantive tutorials of 5,000 - 12,000 words that examine topics in computer science at a level understandable by senior undergraduates. Submissions will initially be judged by a panel of students who will recommend between 5 and 10 papers to a panel selected by the editors. The editors' panel will then select the best paper among these for publication in Computing Surveys. Runners-up will be given honorable mention. Submissions are due by June 30, 1997. For more information, contact Contest Project Leader, John Cavazos (cavazos@cs. umass.edu), and/or see the Contest Announcement on the student web site, www.acm. org/student/.

The article focuses on issues of interest to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) members. The ACM chapters, which will host the ACM 1981 Annual Conference from November 9 to 11, 1981 in Los Angeles, California, will sponsor a professional development seminar after the conference. A call has been issued for participation in the Office Automation Conference to be held from April 5 to 7, 1982 in San Francisco, California. The 9th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, to be held from July 26 to 30, 1982 in Boston, Massachusetts, has issued a call for papers.

The article informs about some activities of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The ACM's Washington D.C. Chapter's 1973 Technical Symposium will take place at the National Bureau of Standards, Oaithersburg, Maryland, on June 21. Program Chairman is Helmut E. Thiess. The article also informs that the 4th Annual Symposium of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Systems Installation Management is scheduled for October 18-19 in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Papers are invited on the following topics: security; virtual systems evaluation; data entry systems-COM; personnel evaluation, measurement, and development; nonprofessional status of data processing personnel; job estimation; etc. The American Society of Indexers will hold its Second Annual All-Day Meeting on Saturday, April 28, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Editors, indexers, librarians and index users will participate in forums and speeches concerned with "Index Traps and Pitfalls: Human Generated/Computer Generated." Three speakers for the morning session include Jessica L. Harris, a professor.

This article presents information regarding the submission invited by U.S.-based Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to its new Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), to debut in early 1998. TISSEC will publish original, archival-quality research papers and technical notes in all areas of information and system security including technologies, systems, applications, and policies. Ravi Sandhu, a professor at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia is the Editor-in-Chief. Members of the editorial board have been listed. Papers should have practical relevance to the construction, evaluation, application, or operation of secure systems. Theoretical papers will be accepted only if there is convincing argument for practical significance of the results. TISSEC will start as a traditional, paper-based journal with future evolution to electronic distribution media expected. The editorial board is committed to a turnaround time comparable to that of research conferences while ensuring archival journal quality.

A major force in shaping the computing profession since 1947, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a powerful, service-oriented membership association offering a huge variety of journals, special interest groups (SIG) and ACM Press books. Members have easy access to them all. This pathfinder is a guide to all of ACM journals, selected best-selling books and some of the most populous SIG, resources sure to add depth and momentum to professional lives. The Pathfinder chart can be used to find resources of particular interest and they can be ordered through an order form. The journal "Communications of the ACM" contains authoritative, cutting-edge articles covering both established and emerging areas of computer technology. Another journal "Computing Surveys" provides comprehensive tutorials and survey papers which helps professionals to develop perspective and identify trends in complex technologies. "Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery" serves as a venue for careful presentation of theoretical research in computing's core areas.

One of the most salient characteristics of extensible machines (EM) is the facility for providing system control over program-to-program and program-to-data linkage (e.g., address connection). It is the intent of this paper to expand and clarify the remarks concerning program-to-program and program-to-data linkage that were embodied in the authors' previous paper on the EM concepts, and to, finally, trace the employment of linkage mechanisms through various levels of programming languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recounts the editorials published in the July 1997 issue of the Communications journal of the Association for Computing Machinery in the United States. Publication of 'virtual Journal for All Members'; Criticisms on the journal; Classification of papers appearing as Technical Contributions.

Presents several letters to the editor about the computing machinery. Dissatisfaction with the quality and nature of the average technical paper presented at the Joint Computer Conferences; Comment on the article "One-Pass Compilation of Arithmetic Expressions for a Parallel Processor," by Harold S. Stone; Use of a coordinate system or characteristic indices for the progress of an algorithm.

The article presents a calendar of events and special activities for the Association for Computing Machinery. Activities include conferences and symposiums on various topics including the "First Annual Conference on Modular Computers," on February 20, 1978 at Brookhaven National Laboratory, at Stony Brook, "Personal Computing Festival," in Anaheim, California, and other activities are given.

This section presents a calendar of events related to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) from February to June 1977. The Eighth Southeastern Conference on Combinatories, Graph Theory and Computing will be held in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Fifth Canadian Conference on Information Science will be conducted in Ottawa, Ontario. The ACM Greater New York Regional Conference will be held in New York City.

The article presents a calendar of events related to computers. The 1985 National Computer Conference will be held on July 15 to 18 in Chicago, Illinois. The Artificial Intelligence in Economics and Management workshop will be held on March 12 to 14, 1985, in Zurich, Switzerland. The World Conference on Computers in Education (WCCE) will be held on July 29 to August 2, 1985, in Norwolk, Virginia.

The article presents a calendar of professional activities and special events concerning the Association of Computing Machinery. Activities feature meetings and symposiums in programming languages, computer architecture, softair program, information technology, and other important meetings about computers.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Press is pleased to announce that the Collected Algorithms from ACM (CALGO) is now available on acm.org. as of February 1997. Originally established in 1960 as the Algorithms Department in CACM, and then transfered to Transactions on Mathematical Software in 1975, CALGO is a collection of heavily used algorithms, either in original form or translated into other languages. Planned enhancements include a cumulative SHAR classification index and the full CALGO library in CD-ROM. Contact address for any information regarding CALGO has been provided.

The article presents information on how to obtain some publications and conference proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It provides the contact address from where the publications and special reports can be obtained. Some of the publications which could be ordered are: "Proceedings of the 5th Annual Symposium on Computer Architecture" and "Proceedings of the 14th Design Automation Conference."

A method is presented for determining whether two given regions are adjacent, and for finding all the neighbors of different sizes for a given region. Regions are defined as elementary squares of any size. In a companion paper [2], we introduce the quadcode and discuss its use in representing geometric concepts in the coded image, such as location, distance, and adjacency. In this paper we give a further discussion of adjacency in terms of quadcodes. Gargantini [1] discussed adjacency detection using linear quadtrees. Her discussion was applied to pixels, and a procedure was given to find a pixel's southern neighbor only. This paper considers elementary squares of any size, and gives procedures for both aspects of the problem: for determining whether two given regions are adjacent, and for finding all the neighbors of different sizes for a given region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quadcode is a hierarchical data structure for describing digital images. It has the following properties: (1) straightforward representation of dimension, size, and the relationship between an image and its subsets; (2) explicit description of geometric properties, such as location, distance, and adjacency; and (3) ease of conversion from and to raster representation. The quadcode has applications to computer graphics and image processing because of its ability to focus on selected subsets of the data and to allow utilization of multiple resolutions in different parts of the image. A related approach is the quadtree. Samet recently presented a thorough survey of the literature in that field [7]. Gargantini [2] and Abel and Smith [1] presented linear quadtrees and linear locational keys that are efficient labeling techniques for quadtrees. In those papers the geometric concepts of the image are discussed by using the tree as an interpretive medium, and the approaches and procedures are based on traversal of the nodes in the tree. In this paper we present the quadcode system, which is a direct description of the image, and discuss the geometric concepts in terms of the coded images themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of various papers related to computers and computing. The paper "Disaggregations in Databases," by Serge Abiteboul, presents an algebraic foundation of database schema design. A new database operator, namely disaggregation, is introduced. Beginning with "free" families, repeated applications of disaggregation and three other operators yield families of increasingly elaborate structure. In particular, it suggests that families defined by one join dependency and several embedded functional dependencies can be obtained in this manner. Another paper entitled "Three Approaches to Heuristic Search in Networks," A. Bagchi and A. Mahanti, analyzes three different approaches to heuristic search in networks. In the first approach the basic idea is to choose for expansion that node for which the evaluation function has a minimum value. In the second approach, in contrast to the earlier one, a node that is expanded once is not expanded again; instead, a propagation of values takes place. The third approach is an adaptation for networks of an AND/OR graph marking algorithm.

A calendar of events for the Association for Computing Machinery is offered. The Sixth Australian Computer Science Conference will be held in Sydney from February 10-12, 1983. From August 23-26, the International Conference on Parallel Processing will take place in Michigan. National Computer Conference will be conducted in California from May 16-19, 1983.

Presents updates relevant to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for September 1971. Schedules of meetings; Discussions on computing machinery.

STAGE2 is the second level of a bootstrap sequence which is easily implemented on any computer. It is a flexible, powerful macro processor designed specifically as a tool for constructing machine-independent software. In this paper the features provided by STAGE2 are summarized, and the implementation techniques which have made it possible to have STAGE2 running on a new machine with less than one man-week of effort are discussed. The approach has been successful on over 15 machines of widely varying characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the origins of computer science and technology, in light of the 100th anniversary of the birth of computer scientist Alan Turing in 2012. The author emphasizes that Turing did not invent the computer. In 1936, Turing launched the concept called the Turing Machine, which has become the main abstract model of computation used by computer scientists. After the Second World War, he designed an electronic computer called the automatic computing engine (ACE) for the National Physical Laboratory in London, England. It discusses the role of Turing in the founding of theoretical computer science.

The authors look at the development of machine learning (ML) models, explaining their view that research studies on the training of ML models should report the quantity of computer usage, or compute, and discussing the need for standardization in the measurement of compute. They cite the number of floating point operations (FLOP) as a basic measurement of compute. They offer reasons for the importance of measuring compute including enabling reproducibility of ML research and aiding in the forecasting of new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

This article details Charles Babbage’s theoretical computer program, the first attempt to specific how to mechanize complex algorithms with a computer, written in 1837. The article also discusses his theoretical computer, the Analytical Engine, that his program would have run on. Topics include Babbage’s first and second code tables and the design of the Analytical Engine.

This paper presents the results of a study in which artists made line drawings intended to convey specific 3D shapes. The study was designed so that drawings could be registered with rendered images of 3D models, supporting an analysis of how well the locations of the artists' lines correlate with other artists', with current computer graphics (CG) line definitions, and with the underlying differential properties of the 3D surface. Lines drawn by artists in this study largely overlapped one another, particularly along the occluding contours of the object. Most lines that do not overlap contours overlap large gradients of the image intensity and correlate strongly with predictions made by recent line-drawing algorithms in CG. A few were not well described by any of the local properties considered in this study. The result of our work is a publicly available data set of aligned drawings, an analysis of where lines appear in that data set based on local properties of 3D models, and algorithms to predict where artists will draw lines for new scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the development of computer hardware and its isolation from computer software and algorithms. She mentions the early history of computers when computers were single use, how the time and cost of hardware development present barriers to software development, and the need for collaborative research.

The article presents information on the 1970 Fall Joint Computer Conference that will be held in Houston, Texas, on November 17-19. The conference will have a truly Texas-sized setting, the Astrohall, the world's largest convention and exhibit structure. The technical program may also appear to be Texas-sized in view of its size and diversity. However, it is not so much the program that has grown as the computer industry. The program has therefore been expanded to reflect new developments in computer usage and technology while maintaining its emphasis on various subjects of continuing importance. One of the chief areas of interest is computer software, its present problems and future promises. Two sessions will be devoted on it. Session 21, chaired by M.A. Melkanoff, University of California at Los Angeles, is devoted to the three principal and self-excluding approaches to long-range programming language development being advocated today. A distinguished panel will present a position paper on each of the three approaches and a fourth position paper on relevant research problems.

The article presents announcements from associations and educational institutions related to computing machinery. The Eighth Annual Symposium on Theory of Computing of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) will be held in Hershey, Pennsylvania on May 3 to 5, 1976. The 14th Annual Conference of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) will be held in Atlanta, Georgia from August 20 to September 2, 1976. The Illinois State University in Bloomington, Illinois is offering a workshop on June 20 to 23, 1976 for college computer science teachers that would explore ways to improve the quality of their courses and course materials.

For the past fifty years, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has been a major professional computer society and publisher of scholarly literature in computer science and engineering. The Association's sixteen refereed journals have earned reputations for being highly respected in the field. Science and engineering fields are now crossing an historic divide in which electronic dissemination is increasingly preferred to printed distribution. ACM is moving aggressively toward making all its publications available in electronic form. This transition has raised questions in some universities about the quality of papers published electronically and whether the review of these papers meets traditional standards. Tenure and promotion decisions have been based in part on a candidate's authorship of printed refereed papers. ACM's policy and procedures are designed to ensure a uniformly high standard for all publications that the Association identifies as refereed, whether distributed electronically or in print. ACM has preserved the traditional criteria and standards for appointing editorial boards and refereeing papers, even as the medium of distribution of the final results is changed from print to electronic formats.

This paper presents methods for empirical evaluation of features of Instruction Set Processors (ISPs). ISP features are evaluated in terms of the time used or saved by having or not having the feature. The methods are based on analysis of traces of program executions. The concept of a register life is introduced, and used to answer questions like: How many registers are used simultaneously? How many would be sufficient all of the time? Most of the time? What would the overhead be if the number of registers were reduced? What are registers used for during their lives? The paper also discusses the problem of detecting desirable but non-existing instructions. Other problems are briefly discussed. Experimental results are presented, obtained by analyzing 41 programs running on the DECsystem 10 ISP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a computationally tractable methodology for including accurately the effects of finite memory size and workload memory requirements in queueing network models of computer systems. Empirical analyses and analytic studies based on applying this methodology to an actual multiaccess interactive system are reported. Relations between workload variables such as memory requirement distribution and job swap time, and performance measures such as response time and memory utilization are graphically displayed. A multiphase, analytically soluble model is proposed as being broadly applicable to the analysis of interactive computer systems which use nonpaged memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the National Computer Conference and Exhibit (NCCE). It is the single annual national computer conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies. For and by computer specialists and end users, the 1974 NCCE will take place from May 6 to May 10, 1974, at Chicago, Illinois' McCormick Place. Stephen S. Yau, general conference chairman, states that emphasis at NCCE 74 will be on present and future applications of data processing equipment and techniques, with special attention to computer productivity as it relates to the user. Data processing products and services will be shown by more than 250 exhibitors in over 800 booths. Almost every phase of computer science and data processing will be assessed in 119 sessions scheduled throughout the five days. Under the direction of Theodore M. Bellan, vice president of Computer Services for McDonnell Douglas Automation Company, the NCCE program will offer in-depth coverage of ten critical user areas and of five specific areas in computer science and technology.

Several letters to the editor commenting on the paper "Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs," by De Millo, Lipton and Perlis are presented.

As computer technology matures, our growing ability to create large systems is leading to basic changes in the nature of programming. Current programming language concepts will not be adequate for building and maintaining systems of the complexity called for by the tasks we attempt. Just as high level languages enabled the programmer to escape from the intricacies of a machine's order code, higher level programming systems can provide the means to understand and manipulate complex systems and components. In order to develop such systems, we need to shift our attention away from the detailed specification of algorithms, towards the description of the properties of the packages and objects with which we build. This paper analyzes some of the shortcomings of programming languages as they now exist, and lays out some possible directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents several letters to the editor about the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Debate over the core competencies of the ACM; Views on computer education in the developing countries; Concern over the publication delay in the journal "Communications of the ACM."

Mixtures of detection, avoidance, and prevention provide more effective and practical solutions to the deadlock problem than any one of these alone. The individual techniques can be tailored for subproblems of resource allocation and still operate together to prevent deadlocks. This paper presents a methods based on the concept of the hierarchical operating system, for constructing appropriate mixtures and suggests appropriate subsystems for the most frequently occurring resource allocation problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A list of upcoming conferences in computer programming as of March 1973 is provided. These include an interface conference by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) at Arden House on May 30 to June 1. The ACM North Central Region will hold a conference on virtual memories and systems at the La Salle Hotel in Chicago on May 18 to 19.

This paper discusses the multiplication of conformable sequences of row vectors, column vectors, and square matrices. The minimum time required to evaluate such products on ordinary serial computers as well as parallel computers is discussed. Algorithms are presented which properly parse suck matrix sequences subject to the constraints of the machine organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several research papers relating to algorithms. The paper "Greatest Common Divisor of n Integers and Multipliers" presents an algorithm which calculates the greatest common divisor, IGCD, of n integers. Details of the method and comparisons to other algorithms are also given. The algorithm is a new version of the Euclidean algorithm for n integers. The n-1 calculations of the greatest common divisor of two integers is accomplished by means of a modified version of the Blankinship algorithm. The paper "Exponential Integral Ei (x)" presents the results of one phase of research carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under Contract NAS7-100, sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It presents an algorithm which was compiled and executed without any modification on a UNIVAC 1108 computer. An unfortunate precedent has been set in several recent algorithms of using an illegal FORTRAN construction.

Sussenguth suggests in a paper (1963) that a file should be organized as a doubly-chained tree structure if it is necessary both to search and to update frequently. Such a structure provides a compromise between the fast search/slow update characteristics of binary searching and the slow search/fast update characteristics of serial searching. His method, however, contains the limiting restriction that all terminal nodes lie on the same level of the tree. This paper considers the effect of relaxing this restriction. First, trees which have the property that a priori the filial set of each node is well defined are studied. It is proved that coding the nodes within each filial set with respect to the number of terminal nodes reachable from each is necessary and sufficient to guarantee minimum average search time. Then the more general case (that is, where the entire structure of the tree is changeable) is treated. A procedure is developed for constructing a tree with a minimum average search time. A simple closed expression for this minimum average search time is obtained as a function of the number of terminal nodes. The storage capacity required to implement the doubly-chained tree structure on a digital computer is also determined. Finally, the total cost of the structure, using Sussenguth's cost criterion, is computed. It is shown that significant improvements in both the average search time and the total cost can be obtained by relaxing Sussenguth's restriction that all terminal nodes lie on the same level of the tree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method is described whereby a digital computer can be used to derive the equations of mathematical physics in any curvilinear coordinate system requested by the user. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated by using it to derive the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid motion and the continuity equation. To derive these equations by this method, the user need know only the coordinate transformation equations relating the curvilinear coordinates of interest to an orthogonal Cartesian triad. When this program is used and the coordinate transformation equations are supplied as input, the computer will derive the Navier-Stokes equations and the continuity equation. The equations obtained will be relative to the curvilinear coordinate system specified by the transformation equations used as input. In this paper the emphasis is on theoretical considerations and methodology rather than on programming details. Results are presented for cylindrical polar and spherical polar coordinate systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large number of calculations in high-energy elementary particle physics involve the manipulation of complicated algebraic expressions containing both tensor and noncommutative matrix quantities. Many of these calculations take several months to complete, although the operations involved follow straightforward rules. In this paper program is described, which has been developed in LISP far solving such problems. The manner in which these problems are encountered is outlined, and their representation in the computer discussed. At present, about six months of human work takes less than Fifteen minutes on an IBM 7090. Limitations of the present system and future plans are also outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]