Publisher's Synopsis
This book investigates a number of techniques which can improve the performance of a problem solver. These techniques work by recording and exploiting the logical dependencies between the elements of a representation.;Significant advances have been made in the development of research and inference mechanisms over the last 25 years, including the development of reason maintenance systems which combine three important features. Firstly an incremental inference system which facilitates the addition of new information without redundantly re-making inference steps which are unaffected by the addition; secondly nonmonoticity - that is the assimilation of new information to bring out the revision of conclusions that were derived without that information; and thirdly, backtracking mechanism which records and exploits dependencies, offering a considerable improvement on the "thrashing" behaviour of chronological backtracking.;This book aims to incorporate two features of reason maintenance systems into the framework of logic programming - selective backtracking and incrementality.
