In recent years, researchers in artificial intelligence have become interested in replicating human physical reasoning talents in computers. One of the most important skills in this area is predicting how physical systems will behave. This thesis discusses an implemented program…

Build is a tool for keeping modular systems in a consistent state by managing the construction tasks (e.g. compilation, linking, etc.) associated with such systems. It employs a user supplied system model and a procedural description of a task to…

Requirements acquisition is one of the most important and least well supported parts of the software development process. The Requirements Apprentice (RA) will assist a human analyst in the creation and modification of software requirements. Unlike current requirements analysis tools,…

by Ronnie E. Thebeau., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2001., Includes bibliographical references (p. 149).

I shall describe a model of the evolution of the rule-structured knowledge that serves as a cornerstone of our development of computer-based coaches. The key idea is a graph structure whose nodes represent rules, and whose links represent various evolutionary…

This report elucidates the linguistic representation of temporal relations among events. This involves examining sentences that contain two clauses connected by words like once, by the time, when, and before. Specifically, the effect of the tenses of the connected clauses…

The typical subroutines that compute $\\sin(x)$ and $\\exp(x)$ bear little resemblance to our mathematical knowledge of these functions: they are composed of concrete arithmetic expressions that include many mysterious numerical constants. Instead of programming these subroutines conventionally, we can express…

This paper describes a method for limiting vibration in flexible systems by shaping the system inputs. Unlike most previous attempts at input shaping, this method does not require an extensive system model or lengthy numerical computation; only knowledge of the…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss some organizational aspects of programs using the actor model of computation. In this paper we present an approach to modelling intelligence in terms of a society of communicating knowledge-based problem-solving experts. In…

We have developed a technique called RISE (Random Image Structure Evolution), by which one may systematically sample continuous paths in a high-dimensional image space. A basic RISE sequence depicts the evolution of an object's image from a random field, along…