The recent American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Anaheim, although disappointingly attended, produced a number of announcements showing that artificial intelligence is now moving ever closer to more traditional computing platforms. Teknowledge Inc unveiled a C-based expert system development environment called Copernicus which supports the Informix and Oracle relational databases. Hewlett-Packard 9000 Series 300 and 800 are to get Lucid Inc’s Common Lisp environment, replacing the proprietary Common Lisp environment that Hewlett has been selling for two years. Franz Inc has moved into Unix by porting its Common Lisp environment, renamed Allegro C, to IBM 370 mainframes under Amdahl’s UTS Unix implementation. Apollo produced an update on its Domain/Common Lisp, claiming three times the compilation speed and 50 times the floating point performance of the previous version. DEC announced that it will distribute the C-based artificial intelligence programming system, Nexpert Object from Neuron Data, and also – not to be outdone by Apollo – unveiled an update of its proprietary Lisp implementation for Ultrix and VMS systems. The new version includes a facility that allows programmers to develop smaller applications, using a subset of Lisp features, that can be executed without a run-time version of the language.
