Inference and Decision Mechanisms in Artificial Intelligence : Final Report

This is the final report for ARO Grant DAAL03-88-K-0082, with investigators D.W. Loveland, A.W. Biermann and G. Nadathur. This grant impacted several projects undertaken by these investigators within the Duke C.S. Department. The METEOR theorem proving project focussed on a parallel implementation of the Model Elimination proof procedure, but discovered that the sequential version is also very powerful. The Near-Horn Prolog project addresses disjunctive logic programming, which extends Horn clause logic (Prolog) by allowing clauses with multiple positive literals. The AProlog project investigates foundationaJ and implementation related aspects of a Prolog extension that incorporates higher-order logic terms and new search primitives into the Horn clause logic framework. The resulting language has been shown to be useful for prototyping new inference-oriented software. The final project is really several projects in learning; foundational, utilizing connectionism, and learning real-time programs.