At this week's GSB, I will be awarding a free drink to the marketing genius who came up with the idea to rerelease the Star Wars trilogy. Think about it - for the next few months millions of people will be watching an ad for the fourth Star Wars movie. And they will be paying $6.75 (not once, but three times) for the honor of watching that ad. Wow.

This marketing savvy was not lost on the good people who bring you GSB every week. Along with MIT Press, we are proud to present "The revised AI reader": a collection of classic AI papers, now in their original 70mm format, including never seen before text, improved graphics, and THX ("the audience is bleeding from their ears") sound. Among the articles included are:

The chapter about k-lines from Minsky's "Society of Mind". Now with Tron-like animation showing the inner working of the brain.

Newell & Simon's "Human Problem Solving". Included is a long-missing section about Simon's experiments with Chewbacca, showing that Chewbacca can't do much problem solving.

Excerpts from "The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence". For the first time, we get to hear the full text of DARPA director Jabba the Hutt's speech. Also included are audio samples of the muffled screams of the attendees as the Ewoks descend upon the conference from a nearby New Hampshire forest.

There will be an author signing and free action-figures available at this week's

  G   I   R   L     S   C   O   U   T     B   E   N   E   F   I   T

7th floor playroom January 24, 1997, at 5:30