Reasoning about motion is an important part of our commonsense knowledge, involving fluent spatial reasoning. This work studies the qualitative and geometric knowledge required to reason in a world that consists of balls moving through space constrained by collisions with…

If we are to understand how we can build machines capable of broad purpose learning and reasoning, we must first aim to build systems that can represent, acquire, and reason about the kinds of commonsense knowledge that we humans have…

This research is concerned with designing representations for analytical reasoning problems (of the sort found on the GRE and LSAT). These problems test the ability to draw logical conclusions. A computer program was developed that takes as input a straightforward…

This thesis describes two programs for generating tests for digital circuits that exploit several kinds of expert knowledge not used by previous approaches. First, many test generation problems can be solved efficiently using operation relations, a novel representation of circuit…

How does a person answer questions about children's stories? For example, consider 'Janet wanted Jack's paints. She looked at the picture he was painting and said 'Those paints make your picture look funny.' The question to ask is 'Why did…

This thesis confronts the nature of the process of learning an intellectual skill, the ability to solve problems efficiently in a particular domain of discourse. The investigation is synthetic; a computational performance model, HACKER, is displayed. Hacker is a computer…

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…

Ontic is an interactive system for developing and verifying mathematics. Ontic's verification mechanism is capable of automatically finding and applying information from a library containing hundreds of mathematical facts. Starting with only the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, the Ontic…

The central thesis of this report is that human language is NP-complete. That is, the process of comprehending and producing utterances is bounded above by the class NP, and below by NP-hardness. This constructive complexity thesis has two empirical consequences.…

This report describes a knowledge-base system in which the information is stored in a network of small parallel processing elements ??de and link units ??ich are controlled by an external serial computer. This network is similar to the semantic network…