Exploratory Model Building

Abstract: Some instances of creative thinking require an agent to build and test hypothetical theories. Such a reasoner needs to explore the space of not only those situations that have occurred in the past, but also those that are rationally conceivable. In this paper we present a formalism for exploring the space of conceivable situation-models for those domains in which the knowledge is primarily probabilistic in nature. The formalism seeks to construct consistent, minimal, and desirable situation-descriptions by selecting suitable domain-attributes and dependency relationships from the available domain knowledge.