Toy Problems And Real-World Problems

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The range of task environments that can be characterized by well - defined problems is vast. We can distinguish between so - called, toy problems, which are intended to illustrate or exercise various problem - solving methods, and so - called real - world problems, which tend to be more difficult and whose solutions people actually care about. In this section, we will give examples of both. By nature, toy problems can be given a concise, exact descri ption. This means that they can be easily used by different researchers to compare the performance of algorithms. Real - world problems, on the other hand, tend not to have a single agreed - upon description, but we will attempt to give the general flavor of t heir formulations. unified because reasoning and problem solving may involve several areas simultaneously. A robot circuitrepair syste m, for instance, needs to reason about circuits in terms of electrical connectivity and physical layout, and about time both for circuit timing analysis and estimating labor costs. The sentences describing time therefore must be capable of being combined w ith those describing spatial layout, and must work equally well for nanoseconds and minutes, and for angstroms and meters. After we present the general ontology, we will apply it to write sentences describing the domain of grocery shopping. A brief reverie on the subject of shopping brings to mind a vast array of topics in need of representation: locations, movement, physical objects, shapes, sizes, grasping, releasing, colors, categories of objects, anchovies, amounts of stuff, nutrition, cooking, nonstick frying pans, taste, time, money, direct debit cards, arithmetic, economics, and so on. The domain is more than adequate to exercise our ontology, and leaves plenty of scope for the reader to do some creative knowledge representation of his or her own. 228 Chapter 8. Building a Knowledge Base Our discussion of the

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