ylfink@water.UUCP (ylfink) (09/17/86)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR
- Friday, September 19, 1986.
Professor Robert C. Holte of Brunel University,
Uxbridge, England will speak on ``The Incremental
Design of Efficient Enumerative Systems''.
TIME: 3:30 PM
ROOM: MC 3008
ABSTRACT
Enumerative (generate and test) systems are notorious
for their inefficiency. This talk will consider the
prospects of incrementally improving the efficiency of
an enumerative system by adding more and more
"knowledge". This method of building efficient
enumerative systems will be compared with the current
(incremental) method of building knowledge-based sys-
tems.
Additional knowledge will not produce significant gains
in efficiency unless it can be effectively exploited by
the enumerative system. Specific details of the sys-
tem, decided in the initial design stage (called the
"generative structure" of the enumerative system),
determine which sorts of knowledge it can most effec-
tively exploit. In other words, the incremental addi-
tion of knowledge will only result in increased effi-
ciency if the initial design of the enumerative system
is biased to be "receptive" to the specific sort of
knowledge which will later be added. Suitably biased,
an enumerative system can be incrementally improved to
have an efficiency (and even an appearance) comparable
to that of a constructive system.
The primary example will be Michael Wharton's (York
University, Ontario) development of a relatively effi-
cient enumerative system for grammar inference (cf.
Information and Control 33:253-272, 1977).
The talk will conclude with a brief discussion of the
use of this design method to build cooperative
problem-solving (e.g. CAD) systems.