Heuristic Programming Project January 7, 1985 Report No. 85-2

BBI, a blackboard system building architecture, ameliorates the Knowledge acquisition bottleneck with generic knowledge sources that learn control heuristics. Some learning knowledge sources replace the knowledge engineer, interacting directly with domain experts Others operate autonomously The paper presents a trace from the illustrative knowledge source. Understand-Preference, running in PROTEAN, a blackboard system for elucidating protein structure Understand-Preference is triggered when a domain expert overrides one of BBI s scheduling recommendations. It identifies and encodes the heuristic underlying the expert s scheduling decision. The trace illustrates how learning knowledge sources exploit 881's rich representation of domain and control knowledge, actions.