Lippard.Multics 1985-04-05 16:15:16 mst Fri
Subject:  Seminar - Machine Forgetting (Rutgers)
Date: 1 Apr 85 13:42:23 EST
From: CHOMICKI@RUTGERS.ARPA


Jan Chomicki, a Ph.D. student in our department, agreed to give a talk
about MACHINE FORGETTING. His research interests in AI are pretty recent,
in fact they date from today morning. The talk starts at 2:50 pm and ends
at 1:30 pm. The place is Hill-402: if too many people arrive, we will move
into a smaller room. Considering many things, the topic of the talk among
others, you should not expect the speaker to be there. The abstract follows:

                Machine Forgetting

We argue that there is no learning without forgetting.
At least, by learning a man forgets how stupid he used to be.
Current research in Machine Learning, cf.(...), doesn't take
this phenomenon fully into account.

We develop a Theory of Forgetting Functor(TFF).
For a class of systems, called Sclerotic, forgetting is monotonic.
However, as our everyday experience indicates,
there also exist non-monotonic forgetting systems.
TFF is one of the variants of a more general Theory of Limited Resources (TLR).
Others include: Theory of Incompetence, Theory of Not Understanding etc.

We implemented a general program, the Forgetting Daemon, that makes any
other program forget about its original purpose, e.g. sorting numbers.
We conjecture that this program may provide a high degree of domain
independence in AI systems.
Take the expert system for diagnosing soybean diseases,
run it through the Forgetting Daemon and the expert system will totally
forget about soybeans.
However, it will also forget about everything else.
We plan to remove this problem in the second version of our system.
A facility of Selective Forgetting will be provided.
The user will define what to forget by means of production rules and/or
menus.

Methodologically, we see several avenues for further research:

1.Example- and Pattern-driven Forgetting.

2.Forgetting Without an Explanation and its relationship with Random
  Forgetting.

3.Forgetting Without a Trace vs.Reversible Forgetting.

4.Meta-forgetting: I forgot what I forgot what...

We would have formalized our concepts, but we are pretty certain that
some graduate student at MIT or Stanford has been working on it for a few
years already.