Keith A. Pray - Professional and Academic Site
About Me
·
·
·
LinkedIn Profile Facebook Profile GoodReads Profile
Professional
Academic
Teaching
                                          
Printer Friendly Version

Intro ] [ 17-CBR Survey ] [ 18-PROMPT ] [ 19-A Design ]

Up: AI in Design ]

Critique: PROMPT: An Innovative Design Tool
Murthy, Addanki *

      Here is another attempt at bridging the gap between weak and strong problem solving methods. Analyze-Modify, which has been used in many of the systems we've studied so far, has been identified (in this paper) as a powerful, general but inefficient solution. the general gist of Prompt is to provide a level of explicit knowledge that is one step above first principles, the term the authors use to denote fundamental domain knowledge, to save the overhead of reasoning with it.

      I questioned the claim that Prompt could "invent" the concept of a tube in the introduction. I was very pleased at how well the example problem and presentation of the system explained and justified this claim. Most similar statements in other research work do not achieve this... or I lack the intellect and insight needed to understand the explanations. Bravo to Murthy and Addanki for speaking down at my level.

      A point is made of the prototypes in Prompt containing structural descriptions and how this helps analyze the behavior of components from first principles. They fail to mention that having a description of structure is necessary for Prompt to be able to change the structure at all.

      An interesting concept is evaluation of a design and attributing the result to the various characteristics of the design in order to choose a modification to produce a better design. This is not trivial task. Prompt does analysis using first principles. A different approach for the same problem could be using back propagation in a neural network. Back propagation is (roughly speaking) a method for propagating error back through a network, adjusting individual nodes until an acceptable value (or evaluation) is achieved at the output end. This requires that nodes that effect the outcome be identified and modified. The nifty part is that the knowledge to do this is not explicitly stated in the system. How well could this technique be used in Prompt?

      What do the author's mean when they say "...envisioning apparatus within Prompt has been implemented..."? In what sense does Prompt picture itself? Also, the paragraph before the Conclusions section seems to belong in that section. Not that that matters all that much I guess.


* S. S. Murthy & S. Addanki, PROMPT: An Innovative Design Tool. In: Expert Systems in Computer-Aided Design, (Ed) J. S. Gero, North-Holland, 1987, pp. 323-341.

Intro
01-DPMED
02-Dominic
03-DSPL Air-Cyl
04-Pride
05-COSSACK
06-MICOM-M1
07-Configuration Survey
08-Dynamic CSP
09-MOLGEN
10-Failure Handling
11-VT
12-Conflict Resolution
13-Cooperative Negotiation
14-Negotiated Search
15-Multiagent Design
16-Prototypes
17-CBR Survey
18-PROMPT
19-A Design
20-Bogart
21-Cadet
22-Argo
23-Analogy Creativity Survey
24-Algorithm Design
25-AM
26-Edison
27-LEAP
28-Plan Compilation
29-ML Survey
30-Strain Gauge
31-Grammar
32-Config GA
33-Functional First
34-Functional CBR
35-Functional Survey
36-Models
37-First Principles
38-Config Spaces
39-Task Analysis

by: Keith A. Pray
Last Modified: August 13, 2004 7:55 PM
© 2004 - 1975 Keith A. Pray.
All rights reserved.

Current Theme: 

Kapowee Hosted | Kapow Generated in 0.012 second | XHTML | CSS