Techniques and Methodology

Editor's Note: AI workers have claimed for some time A partial evaluator is an interpreter that, with only partial information about a program's inputs, produces a specialized version of the program which exploits the partial information. A similar example is described in more detail in Kahn (1982b). Programming methodology in AI shares much with general programming methodology but differs in significant ways. An AI researcher does not typically understand the problem being programmed very well. An essential aspect of a very common style of doing AI research is to write programs in order to understand something better.