richard@cs.mu.OZ.AU (Richard Hagen) (01/31/91)
I'm interested in the analysis of explanations, and a friend of mine mentioned that he had seen a paper about a system by Alan Bundy called PRESS that might interest me. Unfortunately he couldn't supply me with any details of where he saw it or what it did. Can anyone help me out with this? Thanks, richard
roberto@erg.sri.com (Roberto Desimone) (01/31/91)
In article <RICHARD.91Jan31145856@mullauna.cs.mu.OZ.AU> richard@cs.mu.OZ.AU (Richard Hagen) writes: >I'm interested in the analysis of explanations, and a friend of mine >mentioned that he had seen a paper about a system by Alan Bundy called >PRESS that might interest me. Unfortunately he couldn't supply me with >any details of where he saw it or what it did. > >Can anyone help me out with this? I had the privilege of being one of Alan Bundy's grad students for a few years and played about with PRESS for a while. PRESS is a system for solving algebraic equations, written in PROLOG. It makes use of a meta theory to guide the selection of rewrite rules to solve equations. It's pretty impressive, and able to solve 80%+ of algebraic equations from UK GCE A'level Mathematics papers. Another grad student (of Alan Bundy's) Bernard Silver developed LP (which stands for Learning PRESS). This system extended the performance of PRESS to ~90% by learning the strategies for solving equations that PRESS couldn't. Here are references, including some of Bernard's, which provide a good analysis of some of the limitations of PRESS. For further info you should probably get in touch with Alan. His e-mail is: a.bundy@edinburgh.ac.uk Last I heard Bernard Silver was working for GTE in Boston. Last e-mail address I have is: silver@ai.ai.mit.edu @inproceedings(pub171, author = "Sterling, L. and Bundy, A. and Byrd, L. and O'Keefe, R. and Silver, B.", title = "{Solving Symbolic Equations with PRESS}", booktitle = "Computer Algebra, Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 144.", year = 1982, editor = "Calmet, J.", publisher = "Springer Verlag", pages = "109-116", note = " Also available from Edinburgh as Research Paper 171 and in J. Symbolic Computation (1989) Vol 7, pp 71-84.") @inproceedings(pub220, key = "Silver", author = "Silver, B.", title = "Precondition Analysis: Learning Control Information", editors = "Michalski, R.S. and Carbonell, J.G. and Mitchell, T.M.", booktitle = "Machine Learning 2", publisher = "Tioga Publishing Company", year = 1984) @book(silverphdbook, key = "Silver", author = "Silver, B.", title = "Meta-level inference: Representing and Learning Control Information in Artificial Intelligence", publisher = "North Holland", year = 1985, note = "Revised version of the author's PhD thesis, DAI 1984") -- Roberto Desimone roberto@erg.sri.com Tel: (415) 859-4038 SRI International (EK335), 333 Ravenswood Avenue, Menlo Park, CA 94025
cmiller@SRC.Honeywell.COM (Chris Miller) (02/06/91)
Hmmm . . . Although you all have been very helpful in supplying references and brief descriptions for this system, the original poster said his focus was on the analysis of explanations. I haven't been able to see the connections between the descriptions of the PRESS system posted here and the focus on explanation. Could someone spell it out for me?? --Chris