Memory, Reason, and Time: The Step-Logic Approach
Jennifer J. Elgot-Drapkin, Michael J. Miller, Donald R. Perlis · The MIT Press eBooks · 1991
Concern with the real-time nature of effective reasoning led us to develop a memory-based model of reasoning. Later efforts convinced us that a formal treatment of this approach would be fruitful. The current paper surveys the evolution of this work and discusses potential future research endeavors. 1 Motivation Traditional theoretical treatments of reasoning do not, in our view, address reasoning per se at all. Rather they seek to characterize the end results of reasoning. We have four complaints with this. First, it is not clear that reasoning has clearly identifiable end results, but rather goes on and on as part of the active history of an individual reasoner. Second, reasoning is a process or activity, and this is simply ignored in traditional studies. Third, as a consequence, crucial issues of temporal and spatial resources are not taken into account. Finally, if we are going to understand realizable intelligent systems, we must look at what they actually do, i.e., we must accep...