Natural Deduction
Active from 1999 - 2000
Natural deduction is essentially a sequential decision task, similar to many game-playing tasks. In this project, SANE was used to evolve neural networks to identify steps in a natural deduction proof. Incremental evolution through progressively more challenging problems resulted in more effective networks than does direct evolution, and an effective network was evolved faster when the network was allowed to brainstorm'' or suggest any move regardless of its applicability, even though the highest-ranked valid move is always applied. This way evolution resulted in neural networks with human-like reasoning behavior.