Inductive and Deductive Reasoning
Soar's
chunking mechanism is based on
a deductive procedure (the
dependency analysis algorithm) but
this does not necessarily imply the ability to reason deductively.
However,
Soar is a Turing-equivalent computational device and, as such, combined
with its
attribute-value representation,
may be used to reason deductively in a variety of task domains. However,
such deduction must be programmed explicitly; there is no theorem-proving
system built into the
architecture. Additionally, although
Soar systems may be designed to explicitly reason deductively, the
uniformity of the representation
is a weakness when compared to
knowledge
level logic systems.
For a long time, many researchers contended that Soar could not reason
inductively since its
mechanism for learning was
experience-based. In general, it is
difficult to use Soar for inductive reasoning. However,
Rosenbloom and Aasman reported a using
Soar to perform an inductive technique (version spaces). Thus, although
inductive reasoning may be awkward or difficult in Soar (in comparison
to other systems), it is possible. One
issue related to this awkwardness is
the contention that human learning in based on induction.
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