Abstract

Back of the envelope reasoning involves generating quantitative answers in situations where exact data and models are unavailable and where available data is often incomplete and/or inconsistent. A rough estimate generated quickly is more valuable and useful than a detailed analysis, which might be unnecessary, impractical, or impossible because the situation does not provide enough time, information, or other resources to perform one. Such reasoning is a key component of commonsense reasoning about everyday physical situations. In this paper we present an approach that uses strategies and creates an AND/OR decomposition to solve such questions. We present SOLVE, a general-purpose problem solving framework that uses strategies represented by suggestions, and keeps track of problem solving progress in an AND/OR tree. SOLVE can currently solve some fairly interesting back of the envelope estimation questions from different domains. We are building a library of strategies, which currently contains 23 strategies. 1

Citations