AI summary

This paper introduces the "Advice Taker," a hypothetical AI system designed to improve its performance by receiving advice rather than reprogramming, utilizing first-order logic and a calculus of situations to deduce actions from a body of knowledge and fostering learning from experience.

Abstract

Interesting work is being done in programming computers to solve problems which require a high degree of intelligence in humans. However, certain elementary verbal reasoning processes so simple that they can be carried out by any non-feeble minded human have yet to be simulated by machine programs. This paper will discuss programs to manipulate in a suitable formal language (most likely a part of the predicate calculus) common instrumental statements. The basic program will draw immediate conclusions from a list of premises. These conclusions will be either declarative or imperative sentences. When an imperative sentence is deduced the program takes a corresponding action. These actions may include printing sentences, moving sentences on lists, and reinitiating the basic deduction process on these lists. Facilities will be provided for communication with humans in the system via manual intervention and display devices connected to the computer. The advice taker is a proposed program for solving problems by manipulating sentences in formal languages. The main difference between it and other programs or proposed programs for manipulating formal languages (the Logic Theory Machine of Newell, Simon and Shaw and the Geometry Program of Gelernter) is that in the previous programs the formal system was the subject matter but the heuristics were all embodied in the program. In this program the procedures will be described as as much as possible in the language itself and, in particular, the heuristics are all so described.