Notes from Last Week

OK, fell a bit on my research blogging last week, but overall still maintaining. In summary, I finished the "Little Schemer" and now feel like I have my head around Scheme (although the Y Combinator is till a bit confusing, but I did manage to go through the last chapter and implement a giant table-based interpreted for Scheme in Scheme!). Can't wait to get my hands on the "Seasoned Schemer", and I can already see how lambdaXML will allow a level of flexibility in pipelines neverbefore imagined while relying on the good-old-friendly idioms of LISP and the lambda calculus.

Had an interesting meeting with Ewan in which he told me about the IR stuff he was doing and how his work and Bundy (!) could fit in mine possibly...Bundy apparently can clean up messy propositions, which I have lots of!

I managed to write a mapping from XPMDL to lambdaXML for Henry:

http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/homepage/notes/lambda.html

Henry at the meeting revealed to me that the MTP actually decompiles to a significantly more powerful langauge that he believes can implement all the basics needed by lambdaXML version 1.0.
Which I'm not sure if I believe, but if he can explain it to me, then I'll implement it in short order.

I also wrote lengthy notes on Dretske and B.C. Smith, and am going through a giant stack of papers related to the philsophy of computation (starting with Chomskey's classic "Rules and Representations"..), but these aren't quite ready for HTML yet. However, I did manage to write down my draft thinking, available here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/homepage/notes/philosophyabstract.html
The stories from Senga have mysteriously not arrived, which has me worried. Will investigate tomorrow, and will dedicate the rest of next week to finishing the web-interface for the pipeline for Johanna and wrapping up draft one of the philosophy paper for Andy and Henry.