Specification-By-Demonstration: The ViCCS Interface
Steven Minton, Andrew Philpot, Shawn R. Wolfe · 1996
. A goal of the Multi-tac project is to make combinatorial problem-solving technology available to users who have no formal training in AI or OR. To achieve this aim, we have built a system, ViCSS (Visual Constraint Specification System) that enables users to specify problems graphically. To simplify the specification process, ViCSS relies heavily on programming-by-demonstration techniques. We believe, however, that one key to making programming-by-demonstration succeed for our application is to constrain the generalization process so that the system makes only "simple", easy-to-understand generalizations. In this paper we describe several design decisions that enable us to achieve this end, and illustrate them in the context of an extended example. Key Words. User Interfaces, Combinatorial problem solving 1 INTRODUCTION Multi-tac (Minton, 1993b) is a system for synthesizing combinatorial search programs. To use Multi-tac, one must provide a description of the problem constraints in...