A Universal Weak Method: Summary of Results

The weak methods occur pervasively in Al systems and may form the basic methods for all intelligent systems. The purpose of this paper is to characterize the weak methods and to explain how and why they arise in intelligent systems. We propose an organization, called a universal weak method, that provides functionality of all the weak methods. A universal weak method is an organizational scheme for knowledge that produces the appropriate search behavior given the available task-domain knowledge. We present a problem solving architecture in which we realize a universal weak method. We also demonstrate the universal weak method with a variety of weak methods on a set of tasks. 1 1. Introduction A basic paradigm in artificial intelligence (Al) is to structure systems in terms of goals and methods, where a goal represents the intention to attain some object or state of affairs, and a method specifies the behavior to attain the goal. Some methods, for example, hill climbing and means-ends analysis, occur pervasively in existing Al systems. Such methods have been called weak methods. It has been hypothesized that they form the basic methods for all intelligent systems [5], The purpose of this paper is to characterize the weak methods and to explain how and why they arise in intelligent systems. ? We propose an organization, called a universal weak method, that provides the functionality of all the weak methods We provide an implementation of this method in a production system architecture based on search in a problem space.