Rule-Based Reasoning
MACHINE INTELLIGENCE 13
The two outstanding figures in the history of computer science are Alan Turing and John von Neumann, and they shared the view that logic was the key to understanding and automating computation. In particular, it was Turing who gave us in the mid-1930s the fundamental analysis, and the logical definition, of the concept of'computability by machine' and who discovered the surprising and beautiful basic fact that there exist universal machines which by suitable programming can be made to t This essay is an expanded and revised version of one entitled The Role of Logic in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, which was completed in January 1992 (and was later published in the Proceedings of the Fifth Generation computer Systems 1992 Conference). Since completing that essay I have had the benefit of extremely helpful discussions on many of the details with Professor Donald Michie and Professor I. J. Good, both of whom knew Turing well during the war years at Bletchley Park. Professor J. A. N. Lee, whose knowledge of the literature and archives of the history of computing is encyclopedic, also provided additional information, some of which is still unpublished. Further light has very recently been shed on the von Neumann side of the story by Norman Macrae's excellent biography John von Neumann (Macrae 1992). Accordingly, it seemed appropriate to undertake a more complete and thorough version of the FGCS'92 essay, focussing somewhat more on the interesting historical and biographical issues. I am grateful to Donald Michie and Stephen Muggleton for inviting me to contribute such a'second edition' to the present volume, and I would also like to thank the Institute for New Computer Technology (ICOT) for kind permission to make use of the FGCS'92 essay in this way. 1 LOGIC, COMPUTERS, TURING, AND VON NEUMANN
12 Error Tolerant Learning Systems C. Sammutt
They produce one set of rules from one set of data and have no memory which permits them to add to a knowledge base by further learning. Incremental learning systems remember the concepts which they have learned and can use them for further learning and problem solving. Some examples are, CONFUCIUS (Cohen 1978) and Marvin (Sammut 1981). These programs build a model of their task environment through successive learning experiences which require interaction with the environment. The task that we consider in this paper involves a program learning to control an agent in a reactive environment. This is an environment where changes occur in response to actions. Agents other than the learner may be present. As an agent accumulates experience, it constructs a world model or theory of behaviour which can be used to predict the outcome f Present address: Department of Computer Science, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
MACHINE INTELLIGENCE 11
In this paper we will be concerned with such reasoning in its most general form, that is, in inferences that are defeasible: given more information, we may retract them. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a form of non-monotonic inference based on the notion of a partial model of the world. We take partial models to reflect our partial knowledge of the true state of affairs. We then define non-monotonic inference as the process of filling in unknown parts of the model with conjectures: statements that could turn out to be false, given more complete knowledge. To take a standard example from default reasoning: since most birds can fly, if Tweety is a bird it is reasonable to assume that she can fly, at least in the absence of any information to the contrary. We thus have some justification for filling in our partial picture of the world with this conjecture. If our knowledge includes the fact that Tweety is an ostrich, then no such justification exists, and the conjecture must be retracted.
XSEL: a computer sales person's assistant
R1, a knowledge-based configurer of VAX-11 computer systems, began to be used over a year ago by Digital Equipment Corporation's manufacturing organization. The success of this program and the existence at DEC of a newly formed group capable of supporting knowledge-based programs has led other groups at DEC to support the development of programs that can be used in conjunction with RI. This paper describes XSEL, a program being developed at Carnegie-Mellon University that will assist salespeople in tailoring computer systems to fit the needs of customers. XSEL will have two kinds of expertise: it will know how to select hardware and software components that fulfil the requirements of particular sets of applications, and it will know how to provide satisfying explanations in the computer system sales domain.
Machine Intelligence 4
The equivalence problem for program schemes, or for programs, is reduced to the proving of a theorem in second-order logic. This work extends Manna's first-order logic reductions. Some examples of the technique are given together with a suggested method for obtaining proofs in special cases by firstorder methods. INTRODUCTION Several workers in recent years have considered using techniques and ideas of various mathematical theories of computation for proving interesting results about computer programs. This paper is concerned with two of these approaches.