On the Practicality of Abductive Validation
Tim Menzies · 1996
. An abductive framework is described for validating theories using a library of known or desired behaviour. Abduction is known to be NP-hard which suggests that this framework is impractical for anything other than small theories. The computational limits of the framework is therefore explored. We find that abductive validation is a practical tool for the KBS we see in contemporary practice. KEYWORDS: Abduction, validation, computational complexity, expert systems, knowledge acquisition. 1 INTRODUCTION The connection between abduction and other KBS inference tasks (e.g. model-based diagnosis) is well-documented [2, 7]. It would be convenient if we could execute and test our KBS in the same abductive framework. This would remove the need for complicated translations between the executable form of a KBS and its associated test engine. Here we explore KBS validation using HT4, an abductive inference engine. HT4 assumes that the definitive test for a model is that it can reproduce (or c...