GUARANTEED COVERAGE VERSUS INTELLIGENT SAMPLING: A REPLY TO SACKS AND DOYLE 1

People use both expert and commonsense knowledge to reason about the behavior of physical systems in spite of incomplete knowledge. Problem-solving tasks such as diagnosis and design necessarily involve reasoning about systems which are incompletely known, but for which reliable behavioral predictions are important. A number of fields-ranging from economics, to the mathematics of dynamical systems, to artificial intelligence-have developed methods for determining the qualitative behavior of incompletely specified systems. Elisha Sacks and Jon Doyle (1992) (S+D) have written a critique of A1 research on qualitative reasoning, in which one useful contrast between research approaches is buried in a forest of misleading or incorrect claims. The useful contrast is between two reasonable approaches to exploring the space of models consistent with incomplete knowledge about a physical mechanism:

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