Logic & Formal Reasoning
P. J. HAYES
A given representational language can be implemented in all manner of ways: predicate calculus assertions may be implemented as lists, as character sequences, Minsky introduced the terminology of'frames' to unify and denote a loose as trees, as networks, as patterns in an associative memory, etc: collection of related ideas on knowledge representation: a collection which, all giving different computational properties but all encoding the same representational since the publication of his paper (Minsky, 1975) has become even looser.
SESSION 1 PAPER 3
John McCarthy, born at Boston, Mass. in 1927, received his B.S. degree in mathematics at the California Institute of Technology in 1948, and his Ph.D. also in mathematics at Princeton University in 1951. He is at present Assistant Professor of Communication Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His present interests are in the artificial intelligence problem, automatic programming and mathematical logic. He is co-editor with Dr. C. E. Shannon of "Automatic Studies". SUMMARY INTERESTING work is being done in programming computers to solve problems which require a high degree of intelligence in humans. However, certain elementary verbal reasoning processes so simple that they can be carried out by any non--feeble--minded human have yet to be simulated by machine programs. This paper will discuss programs to manipulate in a suitable formal language (most likely a part of the predicate calculus) common instrumental statements. The basic program will draw immediate conclusions from a list of premises. These conclusions will be either declarative or imperative sentences. When an imperative sentence is deduced the program takes a corresponding action. These actions may include printing sentences, moving sentences on lists, and reinitiating the basic deduction process on these lists. Facilities will be provided for communication with humans In the system via manual intervention and display devices connected to the computer.
Legal Knowledge and -- Information Systems
Most recent work on reasoning with cases in law has taken the style of reasoning used in the CATO system as its model, and uses the notion of factors, as found in that system. Fundamental to CATO, a successor the HYPO system, were factors, which are closely related to HYPO-style dimensions. In this paper, we will argue that the simplification involved in using factors, while it has proved pragmatically useful both for clarifying understanding of certain aspects of reasoning with cases and for implementation, causes problems with domain analysis and precludes certain kinds of argument that we would wish to model. We therefore believe that the time is now ripe to go back to the original notion of dimensions, while retaining the insights that have been gained from working with the simpler notion of factors. The paper uses two case studies to argue that this is so.
A Production System for Automatic Deduction
A new predicate calculus deduction system based on production rules is proposed. The system combines several developments in Artificial Intelligence and Automatic Theorem Proving research including the use of domain-specific inference rules and separate mechanisms for forward and backward reasoning. It has a clean separation between the data base, the production rules, and the control system. Goals and subgoals are maintained in an AND/OR tree structure. We introduce here a structure that is the dual of the AND/OR tree to represent assertions. The production rules modify these structures until they "connect" in a fashion that proves the goal theorem. Unlike some previous systems that used production rules, ours is not limited to rules in Horn Clause form. Unlike previous PLANNER-like systems, ours can handle the full range of predicate calculus expressions including those with quantified variables, disjunctions, and negations.