The Art of Abduction

Re:The Art of Abduction by dreamcompiler on Thursday July 21, 2022 @10:06AM (#32179562)

Thanks. This is the closest I've come to understanding abductive reasoning and it's because you've explained it in a way my Prolog brain can understand it. Even though I've never written a Prolog program that abduces goals on its own, now I kind of want to try.

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Re:The Art of Abduction by YeGoblynQueenne on Thursday July 21, 2022 @10:20AM (#32179744)

Thanks! Note that the first two inferences I show above are valid resolution steps since they have literals that are complements under unification, like swan(alice) and swam(X)← (the latter being a negative literal, since it's in the body). But the third and fourth inferences can't be made with resolution.

There is a whole bunch of work on abductive reasoning in a first-order framework, but I'm far from an expert on it. Antonis Kakas is a prominent name in the subject. For example, see:

Abductive Logic Programming, A.C. Kakas, R. A. Kowalski, F. Toni

https://academic.oup.com/logcom/article-abstract/2/6/719/942...

Although behind a paywall. And yes, that's that Kowalski. Here's an unpaywalled overview:

Abduction in Logic Programming, Marc Denecker and Antonis Kakas

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs227/Readings/Abudction%20in...

And here's one on the application to learning:

Abductive concept learning, Antonis C. Kakas & Fabrizio Riguzzi

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF03037531

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