Review of Watson and Trotzky 2006: Self-Organizing Hierarchical Retrieval in a Case-Agent System

(Watson & Trotzky, 2006) describes the implementation of a distributed case-based reasoning system, called case-agent system to mean computational agents representing cases, contrasting it to the conventional approach of one process (agent) that accesses a single case-base. The authors aim to show feature modelling in their system and test performance of retrieval as compared to other retrieval methods, such as based on k-nearest neighbor, compressed nearest neighbor, and the footprint-based retrieval (Smyth & McKenna, 1999). They also demonstrate a simple visualization and conclude that their system’s performance characteristics is similar to footprintbased retrieval, and – due to distributedness and emergent properties – has promising applications. In a discussion, I criticize many aspects of the paper and conclude that the article has some serious shortcomings.