Reasoning by Analogy via Abstraction

Abstract

ion Adolfo Villafiorita January 1996 Technical Report MRG/DIST # 96-0030 universit`a di genova facolt`a di ingegneria dipartimento informatica sistemistica telematica Reasoning by Analogy via Abstraction Adolfo Villafiorita Mechanized Reasoning Group I. I., University of Ancona, via Brecce Bianche, 60131 Ancona, Italy, DIST, University of Genova, viale Causa 15, 16146 Genova, Italy. [email protected] Abstract Abstraction has been used in theorem proving as a heuristic to reduce the search space (see, for instance, [ Simpson, 1988 ] ) and as a tool for explanation (see, for instance, [ Bundy et al., 1993 ] ). We use abstraction to model certain forms of reasoning by analogy. 1 Introduction Reasoning by analogy can be described as the process of finding the solution of a problem (the target problem) by using the known solution of a similar problem (the source problem). This process consists of "extracting" the relevant information from the source problem,..