CLIPS

For the past few days I have been experimenting with C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS). It is an interesting platform to experiment with Expert Systems. The users guide is a good introduction into rule based systems. The software is the topics of multiple books in Amazon. All the books on LISP and Prolog that are in my personal collection have a common theme – building expert systems at some point in the book.

Why an interest in expert systems? Well, IBM Watson, the Jepoardy playing computer, is a high end expert system using statistical inference (possibly bayes net) to find questions to Jepoardy topics. I was also interest in Watson’s capabilities. Also, AL3 is an expert system as well as PARADISE. My interest is in designing a knowledge based chess playing program with the capability of playing like a human chess player using rule based knowledge to solve positions as well as adding new knowledge based on relational learning.

Progress Report – April 2010

My main focus this month has been on researching in topics in reinforcement learning, non-deterministic programming, agent implementations, and finally Prolog and LISP programming techniques.  First my article in Q-learning shares my recent insights into Q-learning.  My purpose to gain a better understanding of Q-learning as to implement it in my block’s world environment. Read my blog entry on Q-learning.

Next, I have been studying Prolog techniques.  For example, in the Sterling and Shapiro book, I was reading about non-determinism in Prolog as a programming technique.  The generate and test approach to logic programming allows the generation of solution X and it gets tested.  Read more my blog entry in non-deterministic programming.

Progress Report – June 2008

In this report, I focused on my presentation for the upcoming ICAI ’09 conference in Las Vegas.  It has currently 18 slides.

I am also viewing the video lectures from the Summer Schools in Logic and Learning from Video Lectures dot Net.  Thus, I have completed the Introduction to Logic video lectures.

I was also reading Michalski’s article on A Theory and Methodology of Induction Learning. Basically it was an article describing the induction process and some the issues associated with induction such as descriptive language, background information, examples, generalization, and hypothesis space.  All this sounded familar when I was reading the two books on ILP.  Induction is a common theme with the two books.  Various familar algorithms are discussed amongst this material.  It appears there are no easy answers in the induction of rules from examples.

Advice Language

Back in 1990, since my goal back then was to develop a chess playing computer algorithm using prolog, as part of my research, I stumbled into Max Bramer’s book Computer Game Playing: Theory and Practice.  In that book there was a chapter by Ivan Bratko called Knowledge-based problem-solving in AL3, which according to the book the article appeared in Machine Intelligence 10.  In summary the AL3 system was basically a production system for chess problem using the Donald Michie Advice Language concept and utilizing Bratko’s IF condition THEN action rule concept.  At that moment of time, many of the concepts presented in the paper were foreign to me, and unbeknownst to me, many of the ideas are presented in Bratko’s AI book (1990).