Path-Based Rules in Object-Oriented Programming

No. 1: Agents, AI in Art and Entertainment, Knowledge Representation, and Learning

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 13

Knowledge Compilation

Object-oriented programming has recently emerged as one of the most important programming paradigms. While object-oriented programming clearly owes an intellectual debt to AI, it appears to be displacing some AI techniques, such as rule-based programming, from the marketplace. This need not be so as path-based rules-forward-chaining production rules that are restricted to follow pointers between objects-fit into the object-oriented paradigm in a clean and elegant way. The combination of path-based rules and object-oriented programming should be useful in AI applications, and in the more general problem of transferring AI techniques to the larger computer science community.