Ask HN: How have you spent time outside work for the past couple of weeks? - alex77456
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mindcrime
Preparing slides and supporting material for a talk I'll be delivering at All
Things Open[1] in about a week.

The talk is titled "AI Sherlock Holmes Style : Introduction to Automated
Abductive Inference"

So I've been working on slides that cover the different styles of
reasoning/inference (deductive, inductive, analogical, statistical, and ...
wait for it... abductive), some history, examples, etc., with lots of quotes
from the Sherlock Holmes canon woven in to illustrate specific points. It
turns out that much of what Holmes did, what he described as "deduction", was
really abduction. So that material works in nicely to help make certain points
more concrete.

As for the implementation, I'm working with Parsimonious Covering Theory, as
developed by James Reggia and Yun Peng. I've written a partially complete
implementation of their approach, and will be including some live demos of how
abduction works with a knowledge-base to generate explanations.

[1]: [https://allthingsopen.org](https://allthingsopen.org)

