DEC 16 8h

December 11, 1970

Professor Joshua Lederberg
Department of Genetics
School of Medicine
Stanford University
Palo Alto, California

Dear Mr. Lederberg;

T am currently a senoir Chemistry major at Ken-
von College, in Gambier, Ohio. In my basic organic
chemistrv course last year, our professor, Owen York, Jr.,
introduced us to your DENDRAL-64 notational system. This
year, as an Independent Study project, I decided to try
to adapt the DENDRAL system to our IBM 1130 computer,
Professor York supplied me with some of your articles
(actuallv copies of revorts to NASA) as an aid to the pro-
gramming of this problem. I have Parts I, II, & III. of
your five-part report, an article by yourself and six other
gentlemen on "Applications of Artificial Intelligence for
Chemical Inference", parts I & II, and the introductory
report on the general outline of the DENDRAL system,
These articles have been a great help in gaining a better
understanding of what the DENDRAL program can and should
do. However, I do not have copies of Parts IV & V of your
NASA report, and these are the parts which weem to have
the majority of the information included necessary for
programming this problem, Therefore, I would greatly

appreciate it if you could send me the following articles

concerning your research into DENDRAL:
1. Part IV of your NASA report, entitled
"Generator Algorithms,"

2. Part V of the same report, entitled
"Directions for Further Analysis.”

3. Your article in Accounts of Chemical
Research, which was in preparation at
the time of the NASA articles,

4, Memo No. 62, Stanford Artificial Intell-
igence Project, February 1967, entitled
“Heuristic DENDRAL: A Program for Gen-
erating Explanatory Hypotheses in Or-
ganic Chemistry.", by B. G. Buchanan
and G. L. Sutherland,

5. A listing of the source program for the
basic DENDRAL program,

I will be more than happy to pay for any covying and/or
mailing cost incurred by you.

I think that creating a DENDRAL program for the TRM
1130 will be an interesting and instructional project,
because the system that we have has only 8,192 16 bit
words of core memory, and in one of the articles that I
read, it is stated that the DENDRAL program uses approx-
imately 40,000 words of memory. Fortunately, our system
also has a disk memory unit on-line, where I have the pos-
sibility of about 200,000 - 300,000 words of storage,
I greatly appreciate your attention and I will inform you
if I achieve any success in adapting DENDRAL to a much

smaller computer than it was originally run on,

Sincerely yours,

Alan G. Janos

216 Bushnell Hall
Kenvon College
P.O. Box #72

Gambier, Ohio, 43022