Re: Rao's "Reminiscences of Influential Papers in Planning"

[Austin Tate <a.tate@ed.ac.uk>]

Happy Thanksgiving indeed, and we have a party here to celebrate that - 
Turkey and all - just to maintain solidarity with our American 
friends.  Just imagine if the Brits were still in charge of the country 
there eh. Turkey would be delayed until Christmas for one thing;-)

3 postscripts to Rao's very nice commentary...

a) Chapman knew the Nonlin QA algorithm work and based his MTC 
formalization on it... he said so with full citations in his thesis, but 
unfortunately omitted that (due to space limitations he later told me) in 
the published paper.  Of course no one read the thesis.  We based a lot of 
our constraint manager "yes/no/maybe" interfaces in O-Plan on QA and MTC 
ideas for years later and still do in I-X/I-Plan.

b) Tom Dean came over to see me near the end of his PhD and gave me hell 
for not publishing in paper he had found until well into his PhD.  I told 
him he should read wider - but straight after he left my office I did start 
to write papers for US journals:-)

c) Thanks to some effort by Aaron Sloman a month ago, he got the original 
Nonlin (minus its later GUI) going again in POP-11 (27 years after it was 
written) and it will be available as part of the open source Poplog system.

Recent stuff.. but don't choke on that Turkey...
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/plan/
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/

Best wishes everyone, Austin