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5:00pm on Monday, 23rd November, 2020:
Anecdote
When the skip left today, it took away some 250-300 hard copies of papers that I read when doing my PhD. As a snapshot of Artificial Intelligence research as it was in the 1980s, it was quite interesting. Two papers had handwritten notes on them by people who now have knighthoods, and two others were drafts of papers that later became well-known. Most, however, while perhaps famous in their day, are now largely unremembered.
Scanning through some of them for nostalgia reasons, I was struck how many of them used formal notations to describe their findings. I hardly read any papers these days that use logics to explain how their algorithms work, but it was natural back then to do so. The papers were on the whole more substantive than much of what I read these days, too (probably because there wasn't yet an ingrained publish-or-perish culture). Some of the topics were quite obvious, but so few people were working in that particular sub-field that they qualified as great advances. Others started influential bandwagons that predictably came to nothing but that had to be addressed at the time so I needed to read up on them.
I kept about 20 further papers back because they were sufficiently built-to-last that I felt I should have copies in my now all-digital paper library. I was hoping I could get them ready-scanned off the Internet, but surprisingly few (maybe 5 or 6) were available. Another two were available but Essex University didn't subscribe to the relevant journal. A final one was available and Essex University did subscribe to the journal, but the journal wouldn't give me a link to a .pdf, it just told me I could now download it. I looked at the web site HTML and it had no link, so gawd knows what was going on there. I have some scanning to do whenever I get back on campus, anyway.
It was a bit sad, throwing out papers I've kept in boxes for 35 years, but if I haven't looked at them for the past 30 of those years then I'm unlikely to look at them in the next 30 either. Sigh...
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Copyright © 2020 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).