Efficient reasoning

Abstract

Many tasks require “reasoning”—i.e., deriving conclusions from a corpus of explicitly stored information—to solve their range of problems. An ideal reasoning system would produce all-and-only the correct answers to every possible query, produce answers that are as specific as possible, be expressive enough to permit any possible fact to be stored and any possible query to be asked, and be (time) efficient . Unfortunately, this is provably impossible: as correct and precise systems become more expressive, they can become increasingly inefficient, or even undecidable. This survey first formalizes these hardness results, in the context of both logic- and probability-based reasoning, then overviews the techniques now used to address, or at least side-step, this dilemma.

Survey of Context Provisioning Middleware

“…In general terms, reasoning derives "conclusions from a corpus of explicitly stored information" [69]. In the original philosophical sense deductive, inductive, abductive, analogical and fallacious reasoning can be differentiated, the first two variants being most relevant: Deduction attempts to show that a conclusion necessarily follows from a set of premises or hypotheses.…”

Context in social simulation: why it can’t be wished away

“…In other words this heuristic solves the "Frame Problem" (McCarthy and Hayes 1969). Greiner et al (2001) points out that trying to apply generic reasoning methods to context-independent propositions and models, will be either inefficient or inadequate. This heuristic also allows the same situation to be considered from the point of view of different cognitive contexts.…”

Learning and Exploiting Context in Agents

“…Trying to apply generic reasoning methods to context-dependent propositions and models, will be either inefficient or inadequate [18]. The generic approach forces a choice of the appropriate level of detail to be included, so that it is likely that either much information that is irrelevant to the appropriate context will be included (making the deduction less efficient) or much useful information that is specific to the relevant context may be omitted (and hence some deductions will not be possible).…”