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Floating conclusions and zombie paths: Two deep difficulties in the “directly skeptical” approach to defeasible inheritance nets

✍ Scribed by David Makinson; Karl Schlechta


Publisher
Elsevier Science
Year
1991
Tongue
English
Weight
529 KB
Volume
48
Category
Article
ISSN
0004-3702

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✦ Synopsis


Makinson, D. and K. Schlechta, Floating conclusions and zombie paths: two deep difficulties in the "directly skeptical" approach to defeasible inheritance nets (Research Note), Artificial Intelligence 48 (1991) 199-209.

We discuss two difficulties in the "directly skeptical" approach to inference in defeasible inheritance nets, as developed by Horty, Thomason and Touretzky. We suggest that as a result of the general architecture of the approach, it is intrinsically unable to deal with a phenomenon of "floating conclusions", and has great difficulty in accommodating a phenomenon of "zombi paths". The conclusion drawn is that the directly skeptical approach cannot hope to do the work of an approach via the family of all extensions.