Doug Lenat, the father of CYC, was interviewed in this month's WIRED. He predicts commercial PC/Mac applications -- possibly data checking within Excel -- before 1996; English conversation with CYC in 1996; understanding of metaphors by 1997; and completed entry of 40M knowledge items by 2004. The current knowledge base is 4M items. [Achut Reddy (achut@eng.sun.com), comp.ai, 4/6/94. Gil Chita.]

SIGART is ACM's special interest group on artificial intelligence. Its new Electronic Information Service is accessible via gopher to sigart.acm.org port 70, or telnet to sigart.acm.org (login eis), or by FTP to sigart.acm.org. See the .INDEX file in each directory. For Mosaic/WWW, the URL is http://sigart.acm.org/. Additional WWW features are planned. If you only have email access, write to eis@sigart.acm.org. [Chris Welty (weltyc@cs.rpi.edu), 4/11/94.]

The Int. Computer Chess Association has a new annual prize for the best computer-generated annotation of a chess game. Programs must be submitted by 12/31/94 to Tony Marsland (tony@cs.ualberta.ca), +1-403-492-3971, +1-403-492-1071 Fax. [comp.ai, 3/28/94. David Joslin.] A 122KB Portable Game Notation (PGN) specification may be FTP'd from chess.uoknor.edu as pub/chess/PGN/Standard. Pointers are also given to archives of game text. [Steven J. Edwards (sje@world.std.com), ibid.]

Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML) is an ARPA-funded format and protocol for message-based DAI information exchange among software agents. UMaryland Baltimore County has a WWW page on KQML: http://www.cs.umbc.edu/kqml/. It has links to related files from Unisys, EIT, Lockheed, and Stanford. [Tim.Finin@cs.umbc.edu, 4/5/94.]

TimeGraph II is a Common Lisp support system for temporal reasoning via point algebra and pointizable interval algebra. Storage tends to remain linear in the number of relations asserted. For a description, see IJCAI-93, SIGART Bulletin 4(3), or IRST TR 9307-44/URochester TR 496. Disjunctions of point relations will be added soon. FTP tg-ii.readme and tg-ii-1.tar.gz from pub/knowledge-tools on cs.rochester.edu. [Alfonso Gerevini gerevini@cs.rochester.edu(), comp.ai, 4/4/94. David Joslin.]