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| Smart Computing® Encyclopedia |
| Mooers, Calvin | ||
| (Oct. 24, 1919 - Dec. 1, 1994) Calvin Mooers was the founder and research director of Zator, plus founder, president, and research director of Rockford Research Institute. He conducted research on the development and use of information retrieval systems, developed the programming language TRAC (Text Reckoning and Compiling), and coined the phrases “information retrieval” and “descriptors.” TRAC was designed to handle unstructured text in an interactive mode. Mooers wanted to explore the use of digital processes and mathematics to enforce some control on the flood of technical reports that were pouring out of the government laboratories. He then presented his ideas on the development of a machine capable of Boolean searching. His research compelled him to invent Zatocoding (1950), an information retrieval system that was digital and mechanical and not electronic (a knowledge-based system that was motor driven). This automatic system used the Zatocoding technique by selecting criteria based on fuzzy sets (elements that can be partially in a set; therefore, given a degree of membership in a set). For example, dogs are canines, cats are felines; these are crisp sets. However, dogs and cats are both animals and therefore a fuzzy set because both are members of the animal set. Zatocoding used a series of specifically designed notched cards, where each notch was a descriptor that represented information in the document associated with that card. In 1947, Mooers and his brother formed Zator, which floundered for many years. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Mooers provided numerous successful information and retrieval studies for government agencies. In 1957, Raymond J. Solomonoff joined Zator and they added AI (artificial intelligence) to its research capabilities. Zator was one of the first companies to receive federal grants for AI research from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Mooers developed the TRAC language in 1959 and founded the Rockford Research Institute (a nonprofit corporation), and he and Solomonoff were free to pursue their grant-funded research. Mooers defined TRAC in 1964 as a program that consists of strings containing sequences of functions that can be nested indefinitely. Evaluations of these proceed from the inside, center level outward, and then from left to right within each level, which causes the execution of a program. And because the executable statements are treated the same as a general character string, a procedure can perform itself or act on other executable statements. Basically, TRAC had completely self-referencing capabilities. Mooers tried to market his creation but found that there were no rights in computer software at that time. The legal profession said that copyrights and patents didn’t apply to languages. So Mooers tried to protect TRAC as a trademark and service mark, but that didn’t work either, and eventually it became the most popular bootlegged computer language property that existed. In fact, many were appalled that Mooers wanted to charge people for his computer language, which led to the introduction of protecting the intellectual property of software. Mooers was one of the first people to advocate the use of existing laws to protect computer programming languages. Mooers earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics at the University of Minnesota in 1941. He moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1946 and earned a master’s in mathematics and physics from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1948. He received the Award of Merit from ASIS (American Society of Information Science) in 1978, and later, in 1996, ASIS presented a session that memorialized Calvin Mooers as a pioneer of information science. Mooers continued exploring TRAC-II, using it in combination with object-oriented programming on PCs, until his death in late 1994. | ||
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