Real-Time Self-Explanatory Simulation

Abstract

We present Pika, an implemented self-explanatory simulator that is more than 5000 times faster than SimGen Mk2 [ Forbus and Falkenhainer, 1992 ] , the previous state of the art. Like SimGen, Pika automatically prepares and runs a numeric simulation of a physical device specified as a particular instantiation of a general domain theory, and it is capable of explaining its reasoning and the simulated behavior. Unlike SimGen, Pika's modeling language allows arbitrary algebraic and differential equations with no prespecified causal direction; Pika infers the appropriate causality and solves the equations as necessary to prepare for numeric integration. Introduction Science and engineering have used numeric simulation productively for years. Simulation programs, however, have been laboriously hand-crafted, intricate, and difficult to understand and change. There has been much recent work on automating their construction (e.g. [ Yang, 1992, Rosenberg and Karnopp, 1983, Abelson...