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Subject: Re: Symbolic: Search, planning, and a prospective

Author: Steven Edwards

Date: 15:44:39 03/15/04

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On March 15, 2004 at 05:48:05, Sune Fischer wrote:
>On March 15, 2004 at 05:06:09, Steven Edwards wrote:

>Wouldn't it be possible to construct a simple testbed to quickly try out a few
>of the ideas and see if they have merrit?

No.  There is too much foundation work needed to get even a simple plann
exercise to work.

>>My effort, Symbolic, has a search space.  Its search space is a plan space and
>>not a position/move tree.  There is a position/move tree, but the plan space
>>search wholly governs its growth.  The tree is not for discovery, but for plan
>>verification.  Absolutely no nodes in the tree are expanded unless the plan
>>search process directs such expansion, one node at a time, and only for good
>>reason.  The node count and the node frequency of the position/move tree is
>>merely an epiphenomenon of the actions of the plan search and so cannot be
>>compared to similar metrics of a traditional A/B searcher.  In fact, given a
>>goal of modeling human behavior, an excessive node count or node frequency is >a
>>sure sign of failure.
>
>How does this work if winning a piece requires a 4 move combination?

Inital pattern matching sugeests the possibility of a specific successful attack
further pattern matching refines the idea and fills in details; a plan is
constructed to persue the idea; the plan is verified via a limited tree search.

>How do you make it search down the first few of those moves, moves which at
>first glance might even seem silly?

Because there is no "first glance".  Symbolic is not a Shannon type B program.
The moves are the last thing it looks at, not the first.

>I can see how you could generate objects of attack, but how do you effectively
>search down the "building up the attack" tree?

Plans can be extended and refined while being verified.  If a plan is making
good progress, then the program can decide to spend extra resources on further
verification including fault detection and repair.

>Each move must be part of a greater plan, on its own it might seem like a silly
>move.

True.

>How do you make this connection and utilize it?

A good working plan has enough detail to get through the rough spots when
something unexpected happens during the verification process.

You might enjoy reading Wilkins' paper on Paradise; he has a good description
and several examples.



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