Preliminary steps toward the automation of induction
Stuart Russell · 1986
Rational inductive behaviour is strongly influenced by ex-isting knowledge of the world. This paper begins to elucidate the formal relationship between the base-level induction to be attempted, the direct evidence for it (positive and negative in-stances) and the indirect evidence (higher-level regularities in the world). By constructing a program to search the space of forms of higher-level regularity WC discover some important new forms which have direct application to analogy, single-instance generalization and enumerative induction in general. We outline a theory which we hope is the first step towards the construction of powerful and robust learning systems. * I