An Evaluation of HR’s Theories

Abstract

In the next three chapters, we will be assessing the HR program. There are many ways to do this, and deciding how to evaluate HR has been a major part of this research. We have adopted a shotgun approach [Bundy 98] whereby we perform many varied tests and apply different evaluation techniques in the hope that, taken together, they provide a fair evaluation. There are three main areas of assessment. In Chapter 12, we assess HR in terms of discovery tasks in mathematics. In Chapter 13, we compare HR with other programs which perform similar tasks. In this chapter, we assess HR’s theories and from this point, the word ‘theory’ will be used for the collection of examples, concepts, conjectures, theorems and proofs produced by HR in a particular session. This is not to be confused with the word ‘domain’ which describes an area of mathematics such as group theory or graph theory.