Publication Details

Reasoning by Analogy as an Aid to Heuristic Theorem Proving

by Kling, Robert E.

Technical Note 49R
Institution: AI Center, SRI International
Address: 333 Ravenswood Ave, Menlo Park, CA 94025
Apr 1971.

Note: SRI Project 8259. Paper accepted for presentation at IFIP Congress ’71, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, August 23-28, 1971. SRI Project 8259. The research reported herein was sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Contract NAS12-2221.

Order an AIC Technical Note

When heuristic problem-solving programs are faced with large data bases that contain numbers of facts far in excess of those needed to solve any particular problem, their performance rapidly deteriorates. In the paper, the correspondence between a new unsolved problem and a previously solved analogous problem is computed and invoked to tailor large data bases to manageable sizes. This paper outlines the design of an algorithm for generating and exploiting analogies between theorems posed to a resolution-logic system. These algorithms are believed to be the first computationally feasible development of reasoning by analogy to be applied to heuristic theorem proving.