A Universal Weak Method: Summary of Results

Abstract

The weak methods occur pervasively in Al systems and may form the basic methods for all intelligent systems. The purpose of this paper is to characterize the weak methods and to explain how and why they arise in intelligent systems. We propose an organization, called a universal weak method, that provides functionality of all the weak methods. A universal weak method is an organizational scheme for knowledge that produces the appropriate search behavior given the available task-domain knowledge. We present a problem solving architecture in which we realize a universal weak method. We also demonstrate the universal weak method with a variety of weak methods on a set of tasks.