PANELS OF THE CRYSALIS BLACKBOARD AND EXAMPLES OF THE APPLICATION OF KNOWLEDGE SOURCES

Avron Barr and Edward A. Feigenbaum, The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence Volume II, Heuristech Press, 1982

A problem-solving paradign that meets the above specifications, to a large degree, is the blackboard architecture of HEARSAY-II, specifically with respect to the issues of knowledge integreation and focus of attention. In HEARSAY-II, an "iterative guess-building" process takes place.... The decision to activate a particular knowledge source depends on the current state of the solution and on which available knowledge source is most likely to make further progress. The control is, to a large extent, determined by what has just been learned: A small change in the state of the blackboard may provide the preconditions to instantiate further knowledge sources. Figure C3-2 shows the types of data and hypotheses that are found in CRYSALIS.