An Outlook on Truth Maintenance.

Abstract

Truth maintenance systems (TMS) have been used in several recent problem-solving systems to record justifications for deduced assertions, to track down the assumptions which underlie contradictions when they arise, and to incrementally modify assertional data structures when assumptions are retracted. This report describes a TMS algorithm that is substantially different from previous systems. This algorithm performs deduction in traditional propositional logic in such a way that the premise set from which deduction is being done can be easily manipulated. A novel approach is also taken to the role of a TMS in larger deductive systems. In this approach the TMS performs all propositional deduction in a uniform manner while the larger system is responsible for controlling the instantiation of universally quantified formulae and axiom schemas.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 1980
Accession Number
ADA093190

Entities

People

  • David A. Mcallester

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Circuit Analysis
  • Computations
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Databases
  • Hash Tables
  • Hierarchies
  • Language
  • Maintenance
  • Military Research
  • Optimization
  • Programming Languages
  • Side Effects
  • Standards

Readers

  • Allergy and Immunology.
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.