Determinate Literals in Inductive Logic Programming

A recent system, FOIL, constructs Horn clause programs from numerous examples. Computational efficiency is achieved by using greedy search guided by an information-based heuris-tic. Greedy search tends to be myopic but de-terminate terms, an adaptation of an idea introduced by another new system (GOLEM), has been found to provide many of the benefits of lookahead without substantial increases in computation. This paper sketches key ideas from FOIL and GOLEM and discusses the use of determinate literals in a greedy search context. The efficacy of this approach is illustrated on the task of learning the quicksort procedure and other small but non-trivial list-manipulation functions.