{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Taming Intractible Branching in Qualitative Simulation","authors":[{"name":"Benjamin Kuipers","slug":"benjamin-kuipers","given":"Benjamin","family":"Kuipers","affiliation":""},{"name":"Charles Chiu","slug":"charles-chiu","given":"Charles","family":"Chiu","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"Qualitative simulation of behavior from structure is a valuable method for reasoning about partially known physical systems. Unfortunately, in many realistic situations, a qualitative description of structure is consistent with an intractibly large number of behavioral predictions. We present two complementary methods, representi ng different trade-offs between generality and power, for taming an important case of intractible branching. The first method applies to the most general case of the proble m. It changes the level of the behavioral description to aggregate an exponentially exploding tree of behaviors into a few distinct possibilities. The second method draws on additional mathematical knowledg e, and assumptions about the smoothness of partially known functional relationships, to derive a corresponding ly stronger result. Higher-order derivative constraints are automatically derived by manipulating the structural constraint model algebraically, and applied to eliminate impossible branches. These methods have been implemented as extensions to QSIM and tested on a substantial number of examples. They move us significantly closer to the goal of reasoning qualitatively about complex physical systems.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/220","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/0220.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/220.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/bibtex/220","volume":{"slug":"1987","title":"Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 1987","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/","year":1987,"location":"Milan, Italy","dates":"","editors":"John McDermott","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":"Reasoning","track":"Reasoning","number":220,"pages":{"first":1079,"last":1084},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}