|
Archive@NYU >
Stern School of Business >
IOMS: Information Systems Working Papers >
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/2451/14533
|
| Title: | AN APPROACH TO DEPENDENCY DIRECTED BACKTRACKING USING DOMAIN SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE |
| Authors: | Dhar, Vasant
Quayle, Casey |
| Keywords: | Dependency Directed Backtracking
Hindsight
Reasoning under Uncertainty
Context-based reasoning
Expert Systems
Domain Specific Reasoning |
| Issue Date: | Apr-1985 |
| Publisher: | Stern School of Business, New York University |
| Series/Report no.: | IS-85-21 |
| Abstract: | The idea of dependency directed backtracking proposed by Stallman and
Sussman (1977) offers significant advantages over heuristic starch
schemes with chronological backtracking which waste much effort by
discarding many "good" choices when backtracking situations
arise. However, we have found that existing non-chronological
backtracking machinery is not suitable for certain types of problems,
namely, those where choices do not follow logically from previous
choices, but are based on a heuristic evaluation of a constrained set of
alternatives. This is because a choice is not justified by a
âset of supportâ (of previous choices), but because its
advantages outweigh its drawbacks in comparison to its competitors. What
is needed for these types of problems is a scheme where the advantages
and disadvantages of choices are explicitly recorded during problem
solving. Then, if an unacceptable situation arises, information about
the nature of the unacceptability and the tradeoffs can be used to
determine the most appropriate backtracking point. Further, this
requires the problem solver to use its hindsight to preserve those
"good" intervening choices that were made chronologically
after the "bad" choice, and to resume its subsequent reasoning
in fight of the modified set of constraints. In this paper, we describe
a problem solver for non-chronological backtracking in situations
involving tradeoffs. By endowing the backtracker with access to
domain-specific knowledge, a highly contextual approach to reasoning in
dependency directed backtracking situations can be achieved. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2451/14533 |
| Appears in Collections: | IOMS: Information Systems Working Papers
|
All items in Faculty Digital Archive are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved.
|
