40304

June 5, 1974

Ce
Dr. David Pager
Information ReThces Program
University of Hawali
Honolulu HI968822

Dear Dr. Pager, Qe .

sere ec et i ly

I was quite intrigued to see your papers on the problem of
communicating complex information {n the communications of the ACM.
(But I was a little surprised not to find your name listed in the
last edition of the ARPA-Net Directory, believing that your program
must be affiliated with the ALOHA node of the network, the latter

corresponding to many of the functions that you were anticipating.

At any rate, I did want to open some communication with you,
and this mail address will do just fine; or alternatively Lederberg@ISI
(since we evidently do have a number of interests in common). I am
enclosing an experiment in paper writing of some years ago which was

not entirely felicitous but which reflects wome of the same linguistic
concerns expressed in your note.

Far more important is what we are trying to do with the SUMEX
community, and I think you may be interested in a preliminary (and
unauthorized!) draft of our mission statement. We are still trying to
get through a policy decision that would enable us to use the ARPA-net,
but failing that we will have communication 2ésves through a commercial
YIMBET interconnection and if ARPA=-net does not work out for us, we will
eventually go to one of the commercial packet switching systems.
Professor Gershh at your medical school will be a collaborator with us
this summer and may be able to convey back to you some more of the
operational flavor of what we are seeking. If you have contacts with
other people in biomedical research that might correspond to membership

in the community, we are addressing, I would be grateful for your
suggestions,

If you know of other literature on the conmunication problems
you have been writing about or could share with me the comment you may

have received on these papers, I would indeed be most interested.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

over

12904

Jone
Dr. David Pager ~2= 6/5/74

P.S. I wonddr if you know of another experiment in the development of
formal language for scéentific statement that is embodied in
the book by Hans Freudenthal “Lincos" which was pueportedly a
design of a language for cosmic intercourse, published 1960,
North Holland. Kyaurg's "Philosophy of Science - a formal approach",
Macmillan 1968, is the most ambitious recent attempt that I know
about; Pat Suppes has been contributing to this area, too. Un-
fortunately, these efforts seem to be a bust as far as practical
application in experimental science is concerned but I may
attribute this more to our own witlessness than to the inherent
impossibility. If you have your own bibliography on this general
subject, I would be grateful to be able to share it with you.