The general strategy of Meta-DENDRAL is to reason from data to plausible generalizations and then to organize the generalizations into a unified theory. Three main subprobleras are discussed: (1) explain the experimental data for each individual chemical structure, (2) generalize the results from each structure to all structures, and (3) organize the generalizations into a unified theory. The program is built upon the concepts and programmed routines already available in the Heuristic DENDRAL performance program, but goes beyond the performance program in attempting to formulate the theory which the performance program will use. I. Introduction Theory formation in science embodies many elements of creativity which make it both an interesting and challenging task for artificial intelligence research. One of the goals of the Heuristic DENDRAL project has long been the study of processes underlying theory formation.

"A computer program has been written which can formulate hypotheses from a given set of scientific data. The data consist of the mass spectrum and the empirical formula of an organic chemical compound. The hypotheses which are produced describe molecular structures which are plausible explanations of the data. The hypotheses are generated systematically within the program's theory of chemical stability and within limiting constraints which are inferred from the data by heuristic rules. The program excludes hypotheses inconsistent with the data and lists its candidate explanatory hypotheses in order of decreasing plausibility. The computer program is heuristic in that it searches for plausible hypotheses in a small subset of the total hypothesis space according to heuristic rules learned from chemists."In Meltzer, B., Michie, D., and Swann, M. (Eds.), Machine Intelligence 4, pp. 209-254. Edinburgh University Press

In von Foerster, H. (ed) Illinois Symposium on Principles of Self-Organization, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, IL (1960)

Research report RC 294, IBM, Yorktown Heights, New York

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