comp.ai: Introduction and guidelines for posters -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to comp.ai - a moderated newsgroup on Artificial Intelligence. This article contains introductory information for posters/readers and links to the FAQ. If you plan to submit to comp.ai, please read this. Comp.ai has existed since the early days of USENET (at least 10 years) and has been a moderated newsgroup since 5th May 1999. The official charter and moderation policies are included below. The current moderator is David Kinny, but the actual moderation is done largely automatically by an intelligent :-) agent (the AI-mod-bot). FAQ and subgroups The AI FAQ (maintained by Ric Crabbe and Amit Dubey), posted monthly to comp.ai and also to {comp,news}.answers, is here in (currently 7) parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Specialized subgroups of comp.ai that are currently active include: comp.ai.alife: Artificial Life. comp.ai.fuzzy: Fuzzy Logic comp.ai.games: AI applied to computer games programming. comp.ai.genetic: Genetic programming, evolutionary computation. comp.ai.jair.papers: Online papers of the Journal of AI Research. (M) comp.ai.jair.announce: Announcements & abstracts of JAIR papers. (M) comp.ai.nat-lang: AI applied to natural language processing. comp.ai.neural-nets: All aspects of neural networks. comp.ai.philosophy: Philosophical aspects of Artificial Intelligence. comp.ai.shells: Artificial Intelligence applied to shells. comp.ai.vision: Artificial Intelligence Vision Research. (M) Posting To submit an article, try just posting it, or if that fails mail your article to here or here. If your news/mail system is working correctly the article will appear or you will receive an auto-reply from [ai-request@cs.mu.oz.au] that your article has been received and is in the queue, or perhaps that it has been been already posted or rejected for some reason. If you don't see it or receive such a reply within a day or two it's because your mail address was not valid or reachable, you have sent spam, you have been added to the blacklist for one sin or another, or because something somewhere is seriously broken. Please feel free to send a followup query to the moderator, but please DON'T resubmit the article unless you're sure that it never actually got sent. If you've received an acknowledgement your article will have been or will eventually be posted or rejected (you'll usually be notified), but it may take some time for this to occur, and it may take some time more for you to see the article in your local news feed. Please be patient! Moderation is done automatically by the AI-mod-bot and is usually fast, but may be slower if this is the first time you have submitted, your previous submissions have been rejected for one reason or other, or you're posting with a funny subject or from a site used by spammers. Content Posts whose content is "On Topic" will usually be accepted, but posts may be rejected for a variety of reasons by the AI-mod-bot or at the moderator's discretion, including those in the moderation policy below. Spam, posts from blacklisted sources, and posts with faked headers may be ignored without acknowledgement and/or result in the poster being blacklisted. Currently, all cross-posted articles will be automatically rejected: please resubmit them to comp.ai separately. You should really consider whether your article better belongs in one of the above specialized AI subgroups. Comp.ai is not intended to be a forum for articles on specialized topics for which other subgroups exist, unless they have a clear relevance to a wider AI audience. Format Please send well-formatted posts in English (or American :-) in plain text (not HTML), without attachments. Avoid long signatures, which may get stripped or mangled, excessive quotation, and misleading Subject: lines. If you are following up a thread that has drifted away from its original topic, please modify the subject line appropriately. Headers Please include a meaningful Subject: line, and if appropriate begin it with a prefix that helps readers distinguish the type of post. If your article is an announcement use ANN:, if a Call For Papers or Participation use CFP:, other suitable prefixes might be JOB:, WANTED:, etc. In these cases you should probably include a "Followup-To: poster" header; followups will otherwise automatically be set to the newsgroup. Charter of comp.ai Comp.ai is a moderated forum for announcements, reports, enquiries and discussions about the theory, practice, history and state-of-the-art of Artificial Intelligence. Its scope is AI in general, but it is not intended to be a forum for postings concerning areas of AI for which specialized subgroups exist, unless they have a clear wider relevance. Announcements of conferences, books, other publications, researches, applications, educational programs, and other happenings are relevant, as are those of AI positions available and non-commercial AI software. Moderation policies: Postings consistent with this charter are welcomed. Binary postings, personal attacks, vulgarity, and postings of a purely commercial nature will not be accepted, nor will those with an excessive ratio of quoted to new material or misleading headings. Posters of frequently asked questions may instead be directed to relevant resources. Contacts and Acknowledgements Correspondence and enquiries about policies, process, posts, problems, etc. should be sent to the moderator. The moderation of comp.ai is hosted by the Intelligent Agent Laboratory at the Department of Computer Science of The University of Melbourne, Australia. David Kinny, Moderator comp.ai