---
title: "Learning Strategies by Reasoning about Rules"
authors:
  - "D. Paul Benjamin"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/51"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/0051.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1987
pages: "256-258"
track: "Knowledge Acquisition"
keywords:
---

# Learning Strategies by Reasoning about Rules

D. Paul Benjamin

*Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 256-258.

## Abstract

One of the major weaknesses of current automated reasoning systems is that they lack the ability to control inference in a sophisticated, context-directed fashion. General strategies such as the set-of-support strategy are useful, but have proven inadequate for many individual problems. A strategy component is needed that possesses knowledge about many particular domains and problems. Such a body of knowledge would require a prohibitive amount of time to construct by hand. This leads us to consider means of automatically acquiring control knowledge from example proofs. One particular means of learning is explanation-based learning. This paper analyzes the basis of explanations - finding weakest preconditions that enable a particular rule to fire - to derive a representation within which explanations can be extracted from examples, generalized and used to guide the actions or a problem-solving system.