Advice on the Fast-paced World of Electronics

Abstract

This paper is a reprint of a sketch of an electronic-circuit-designing program, submitted a a Ph.D. proposal. It describes the electronic design problem with respect to the classic trade-off between expertise and generality. The essence of the proposal is to approach the electronics domain indirectly, by writing an "advice-taking" program (in McCarthy's sense) which can be told about electronics, including heuristic knowledge about the use of specific electronics expertise. The core of this advice taker is a deductive program capable of deducing what its strategies should be.