TR available

[Mark.Derthick@MCC.COM]

For copies of my thesis, ask copetas at cs.cmu.edu for CMU-CS-88-182
"Mundane Reasoning by Parallel Constraint Satisfaction."

I am 1200 miles away from the reports, so asking me doesn't do you any
good:
Mark Derthick
MCC
3500 West Balcones Center Drive
Austin, TX 78759
(512)338-3724
Derthick at MCC.COM

If you have previously asked me for this report, it should be arriving
soon.  There aren't many extra copies right now, so requests to copetas
may be delayed for a while.

ABSTRACT
Connectionist networks are well suited to everyday common sense
reasoning.  Their ability to simultaneously satisfy multiple soft
constraints allows them to select from conflicting information in
finding a plausible interpretation of a situation.  However these
networks are poor at reasoning using the standard semantics of
classical logic, based on truth in all possible models.  This thesis
shows that using an alternate semantics, based on truth in a single
most plausible model, there is an elegant mapping from theories
expressed using the syntax of propositional logic onto connectionist
networks.  An extension of this mapping to allow for limited use of
quantifiers suffices to build a network from knowledge bases expressed
in a frame language similar to KL-ONE.  Although finding optimal
models of these theories is intractable, the networks admit a fast
hill climbing search algorithm that can be tuned to give satisfactory
answers in familiar situations.  The Role Shift problem illustrates
the potential of this approach to harmonize conflicting information,
using structured distributed representations.  Although this example
works well, much remains before realistic domains are feasible.