META-DENDRAL

META-DENDRAL is an inductive prograrn that automatically formulates new rules for DENDRAL to use in explaining data about unknown chemical compounds. Using the plan-generate-test paradigm, META-DENDRAL has successfully formulated rules of mass spectrometry, both by rediscovering existing rules and by proposing entirely new rules. Although META-DENDRAL is no longer an active program, its contributions to ideas about learning and discovery are being applied to new domains. Among these ideas are that induction can be automated as heuristic search; that, for efflciency, search can be broken into two steps--approximate and refined; that learning must be able to cope with noisy and incomplete data; and that learning multiple concepts at the same time is sometimes inescapable. (1970-1976)