11 An Experiment in Automatic Induction R. J. Popplestone

INTRODUCTION The problem discussed in this paper, namely that of finding a function to satisfy a given argument-value table, is by no means new to computing science, or to mathematics. Thus, for example, the problem of fitting a curve to a set of points is a part of numerical analysis. However, I am concerned with finding a function over a non-metric space, and so my work is closer to that of Feldman et al. (1969) in what they call, 'grammatical inference' or to the automaton-synthesizing programs described by Fogel, Owens and Walsh (1966). There have been some applications of learning devices. Perhaps the best known is Samuel's checkers program (Samuel 1967), but Murray and Elcock (1968) have a system for describing generalized board states in Go-Moku that employs a much richer language to describe the concepts learnt.