Duce, an Oracle-Based Approach to Constructive Induction

Abstract

Duce 1 is a Machine Learning system which suggests high-level domain features to the user (or oracle on the basis of a set of example object descriptions. Six transformation operators are used to successively compress the given examples by generalisation and feature construction. In this paper Duce is illustrated by way of its construction of a simple animal taxonomy and a hierarchical parity checker. However, Duce's main achievement has been the restructuring of a substantial expert system for deciding whether positions within the chess endgame of King-and-Pawn-on-a7 v. Kingand -Rook (KPa7KR) are won-for-white or not. The new concepts suggested by Duce for the chess expert system hierarchy were found to be meaningful by the chess expert Ivan Bratko. An existing manually created KPa7KR solution, which was the basis of a recent PhD thesis [ 20 ] , is compared to the structure interactively created by Duce. A second major expert system application of Duce was made within a diagnostic ...