Book review: Inductive Logic Programming: From Machine Learning to Software Engineering by Francisco Bergadano and Daniele Gunetti (MIT Press, 1995)

ABSTRACT

Suppose that you want to use your intelligent programmer's assistant to write a program, for example, one that will insert elements into a balanced binary tree. One way you could proceed would be to provide your assistant with a complete specification for the program. This is the approach, influenced by the "water-fall model," taken in classical software engineering. But here is another idea. You give your assistant some examples of how you want the program to work, and ask him to write the program. If the assistant is a bright undergraduate, the examples should be enough. What if the assistant is itself a program?