---
title: "On The Storage Economy Of Error-Tolerating Question-Answering Systems"
authors:
  - "Judea Pearl"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/88"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/0088.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1975
pages: "562-567"
track: "A.I. Software"
keywords:
---

# On The Storage Economy Of Error-Tolerating Question-Answering Systems

Judea Pearl

*Proceedings of the Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 562-567.

## Abstract

The possibility of saving various computational resources is an argument often advanced in favor of permitting question-answering systems to make occasional errors. In this paper we establish absolute bounds on the amount of memory savings that is achievable with a specified error level forcertain types of question-answering systems. Question-answering systems are treated as communication channels carrying information concerning the acceptable answers to an admissible set of queries. Shannon's rate-distortion theory is used to calculate bounds on the memory required for several question-answering tasks. For data retrieval, pattern-classification, and position-matching systems it was found that only small memory gains could be materialized from error-tolerance. In pair-ordering tasks on the other hand, more significant memory savings could be accomplished if small errorrates are tolerated. Similar limitations govern the tradeoffs between error and computation time.