A uniform architecture for rule-based meta-reasoning and representation: a case study

• Authors: A. S. Maida
• Venue: ACM '87 Proceedings of the 1987 Fall Joint Computer Conference on Exploring technology: today and tomorrow
• Year: 1987

This Paper describes an elegant architecture for reasoning with meta representations. The architecture uses the same inference engine both for reasoning/representation and meta reasoning/representation. The resulting system is very good at reasoning about its representations as long as it does not have to directly modify its control structure.We have examined this architecture for application to the domain of belief reasoning. Such a system seems well matched to belief reasoning applications where the process of simply reasoning about another agent's beliefs would never directly change that other agent's beliefs. We have concluded that even in such a promising domain, a uniform architecture seems too costly in terms of various practical considerations including: clarity, speed, and parallelizability. Although, we consider this only one particular case study, it is hard to imagine an application area more well suited to the features that this architecture can offer. As such we would expect less encouraging results in other domains.