42 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
42 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
# Introduction to Wildwood
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I started building Wildwood nearly forty years ago on InterLisp-D workstations.
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Then, because of changing academic projects, I lost access to those machines,
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and the project was effectively abandoned. But, I've kept thinking about it; it
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has cool ideas.
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## Explicable inference
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Wildwood was a follow on from ideas developed in Arboretum, an inference system
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based on a novel propositional logic using defaults. Arboretum was documented in
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our paper
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[Mott, P & Brooke, S: A graphical inference mechanism : Expert Systems Volume 4, Issue 2, May 1987, Pages 106-117]
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(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1468-0394.1987.tb00133.x)
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Two things were key about this system: first, we had a systematic mechanism for
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eliciting knowledge from domain experts into visual representations which it
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was easy for those experts to validate, and second, the system could easily
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generate high quality natural language explanations of its decisions, which
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could be understood (and therefore be challenged) by ordinary people
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This explicability was, I felt, a key value. Wildwood, while being able to infer
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over much broader and more messy domains, should be at least as transparent
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and easy to understand as Arboretum.
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## Game theoretic reasoning
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The insight which is central to the design of Wildwood is that human argument
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does not seek to preserve truth, it seeks to be hegemonic: to persuade the
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auditor of the argument of the advocate.
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Consequently, an inference process should be a set of at least two arguing
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processes, each of whom takes a different initial view and seeks to defend it
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using a system of legal moves.
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## Against truth
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Wildwood was originally intended to be a part of my (unfinished) thesis,
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[Against Truth](AgainstTruth.html), which is included in this archive for
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your amusement.
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