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Critique: Design Problem Solving: A Task Analysis
Chandrasekaran *

      I am curious what other classes of design there are besides that which produces a design for an artifact that is meant to achieve some function within some constraints. It seems this covers most every kind of design. The author offers no other examples. I also would have liked to see an explanation of why cased-based design proposal has much in common with analogical reasoning, however brief.

      Critiquing as described in the article seems to have much in common with the suggestion concept that appears in systems that handle conflict resolution. A suggestion to resolve a conflict usually supplies a list of possible remedies to a particular problem, pointing out a more distant problem than the one currently identified. It seems as though suggestions could be a more abstract, or maybe compiled form of critique. (Thanks to D.C. Brown for the compiled comment.)

      It may be a pet peeve, but mentioning hill climbing without pointing out the problem of local maximums seems incomplete. Hopefully the intended audience of this article is familiar with this concept. Still, it is such a fundamental problem with most incremental search techniques it seems to warrant at least a half sentence of warning.

      I found this article to be a nice summary of many of the techniques and concepts we've studied. This was slightly surprising since it is eleven years old. It may have served well as an introduction to the course, but possibly confusing. Would have been interesting to have it as the first and last article to read. A comparison of the critiques for each might have made for a good discussion to end the course.


* B. Chandrasekaran, Design Problem Solving: A Task Analysis. AI Magazine, Special Issue on Design, (Eds) J. S. Gero & M. L. Maher, AAAI, Vol. 11, No. 4, Winter 1990, pp. 59-71.
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by: Keith A. Pray
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