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Open AccessProceedings Article

Learning about systems that contain state variables

TLDR
This paper formalizes this learning problem and presents a method called the iterative extension method for solving it, which is being implemented and applied to the problem of learning UNIX file system commands by observing a tutorial interaction with UNIX.
Abstract
It is difficult to learn about systems that contain state variables when those variables are not directly observable. This paper formalizes this learning problem and presents a method called the iterative extension method for solving it. In the iterative extension method, the learner gradually constructs a partial theory of the state-containing system. At each stage, the learner applies this partial theory to interpret the I/O behavior of the system and obtain additional constraints on the structure and values of its state variables. These constraints can be applied to extend the partial theory by hypothesizing additional internal state variables. The improved theory can then be applied to interpret more complex I/O behavior. This process continues until a theory of the entire system is obtained. Several sufficient conditions for the success of this method are presented including (a) the observability and decomposability of the state information in the system, (b) the learnability of individual state transitions in the system, (c) the ability of the learner to perform synthesis of straight-line programs and conjunctive predicates from examples and (d) the ability of the learner to perform theory-driven data interpretation. The method is being implemented and applied to the problem of learning UNIX file system commands by observing a tutorial interaction with UNIX.

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Citations
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References
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Learning Efficient Classification Procedures and Their Application to Chess End Games

TL;DR: A series of experiments dealing with the discovery of efficient classification procedures from large numbers of examples is described, with a case study from the chess end game king-rook versus king-knight.
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A Structure for Plans and Behavior

TL;DR: Progress to date in the ability of a computer system to understand and reason about actions is described, and the structure of a plan of actions is as important for problem solving and execution monitoring as the nature of the actions themselves.
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Learning Structural Descriptions From Examples

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a method to solve the problem of energy efficiency in the context of electrical engineering, and demonstrate that it can be achieved by using energy minimization techniques.
Journal ArticleDOI

Forward reasoning and dependency-directed backtracking in a system for computer-aided circuit analysis

TL;DR: In this paper, a rule-based system for computer-aided circuit analysis, called EL, is presented, which is written in a rule language called ARS, and implemented by ARS as pattern-directed invocation demons monitoring an associative data base.