September 25, 1984

When it opens a new boutique, Benetton is usually satisfied with a modest appearance - a bright green facade, say, and wooden clothing shelves propped against the walls. The overall effect is, to say the least, unprepossessing, as befits the fashion equivalent of fast food. But several years ago, when Benetton sought to open a boutique along Zurich's meticulous Bahnhofstrasse, the avenue's store owners and bankers objected that the design was below-standard. Benetton adapted, overcoming the resistance with ingenious window displays and elegant furnishings, and now the shop is among Benetton's most profitable.

Jim Wiley set his boning knife down and wiped his large hands on a blood- stained butcher's apron. Like many of his fellow storekeepers, he has been fuming for weeks over the arrival in town of a duty-free store. ''It's bigger than us,'' he said, standing behind the white enamel meat counter at Wiley Brothers Red and White, the market he runs here with his brother Harold. The duty-free store - really nothing more than a window in a stone wall - is squeezed into a corner of Gault's Bait Shop. ''Be Ready to Fish,'' reads the motto over the door of the bait shop, which sits near a dock here on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario where the car ferry from Wolfe Island in Canada chugs in a dozen times a day.

EXPERTS pursuing one of man's most audacious dreams - to create machines that think - have stumbled while taking what seemed to be an elementary first step. They have failed to master vision. After two decades of research, they have yet to teach machines the seemingly simple act of being able to recognize everyday objects and to distinguish one from another. Instead, they have developed a profound new respect for the sophistication of human sight and have scoured such fields as mathematics, physics, biology and psychology for clues to help them achieve the goal of machine vision. The result has been a burst of new ideas, techniques and ways of building computers that suggest the riddle may be soluble after all. Dozens of universities and corporations have embarked on the quest with renewed vigor, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, Columbia, Xerox, General Motors, General Electric and International Business Machines.

''History demonstrates beyond controversy that just as the arms competition has its root in political suspicions and anxieties, so it can be channeled in more stabilizing directions and eventually be eliminated if those political suspicions and anxieties are addressed as well.'' - President Reagan. (A10:5.)

At 11:13 this morning, John S. R. Shad, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, inserted an eight-inch floppy disk into a computer terminal, sending 85 pages of corporate data speeding into the agency's public reference files and initiating the commission's long-awaited electronic filing and retrieval system. Mr. Shad, turning to an audience of about 50 officials and journalists, called the event a ''step through the looking glass into a future wonderland.'' After a year or so of testing, the agency will begin to make millions of pages of company disclosures instantly available to investors and analysts using computers. At first, however, the data will be accessible only on International Business Machines Corporation Personal Computers at the agency's public reference room here and in similar offices in New York and Chicago. Not until March 1986, or later, will investors sitting at home computers be able to look at the commission's electronic files.