Self-Explanatory Simulations: An Integration of Qualitative and Quantitative Knowledge

Abstract

A central goal of qualitative physics is to provide a framework for organizing and using quantitative knowl-edge. One important use of quantitative knowledge is numerical simulation. While current numerical simula-tors are powerful, they are often hard to construct, do not reveal the assumptions underlying their construc-tion, and do not produce explanations of the behaviors they predict. This paper shows how to combine qualita-tive and quantitative models to produce a new class of self-explanatory simulations which combine the advan-tages of both kinds of reasoning. Self-explanat*ory sim-ulations provide the accuracy of numerical models and the interpretive power of qualitative reasoning. We de-fine what self-explanatory simulations are and show how to construct them automatically. We illustrate their power with some examples generated with an imple-mented system, SIHGEN. We analyze the limitations of our techniques, and discuss plans for future work. 1