The following is a brief introduction to IDEAL and what you will need
to do to get the IDEAL distribution.

What IDEAL is
--------------
IDEAL is a test bed for work in influence diagrams and Bayesian
networks.  It contains various inference algorithms for belief
networks and evaluation algorithms for influence diagrams.  It
contains facilities for creating and editing influence diagrams and
belief networks. The following paper contains an overview of IDEAL:

  Srinivas, S . and Breese, J. (1990) IDEAL: A software package for
  analysis of influence diagrams. Proceedings of the Sixth Uncertainty
  Conference in AI, Cambridge, MA.

Implementation details 
-----------------------
IDEAL is written in pure Common Lisp and so it will run in Common Lisp
on any platform. The emphasis in writing IDEAL has been on code
clarity and providing high level programming abstractions. It thus is
very suitable for experimental implementations which need or extend
belief network technology.

At the highest level, IDEAL can be used as a subroutine library which
provides belief network inference and influence diagram evaluation as
a package. The code is documented in a detailed manual and so it is
also possible to work at a lower level on extensions of belief network
methods.

IDEAL comes with an optional graphic interface written in CLIM. If
your Common Lisp also has CLIM, you can run the graphic interface.

Distribution method
-------------------
IDEAL is distributed as a compressed UNIX tar file. This file is
automatically FTPed to your machine. You need a Unix machine to
decompress and recover the file structure from the coded file.
However, you can then move the source to any Common Lisp platform.

The manual comes as part of the distribution. A DVI version and a
Postscript version are provided. You can print whichever is convenient
for you.

How to obtain the IDEAL distribution
---------------------------------- 
If you would like to have the IDEAL distribution please contact us at
Rockwell Science Center, Palo Alto.  In addition, for administrative
purposes, please also send us an email message where you say you will
use IDEAL only for 'research (non-commercial) purposes'.

Contacting us
-------------
 Sampath Srinivas             srinivas@rpal.rockwell.com  (415) 325-7174

 Rockwell International Science Center, 
 444 High St, Palo Alto, CA 94301