Abstraction as a Form of Elaboration Tolerance

Abstract

Elaboration tolerance is ``the ability of accepting changes to a person`s or a computer program`s representation of facts without starting all over``. In this paper we investigate how abstraction helps in achieving a certain degree of elaboration tolerance. We do so by mechanizing in ABSFOL (an interactive theorem prover with abstraction) two famous representations of the missionaries and cannibals problem and by showing how abstraction helps in finding solutions in such representations ``... without starting all over.`