Why Early Intervention Works

Why PRODIGY/EBL Works

Explanation-Based Learning (EBL) fails to accelerate problem solving in some problem spaces. How do these problem spaces differ from the ones in Minton’s experiments [1988b]? Can minute modifications to problem space encoding drastically alter EBL’s performance? Will PRODIGY/EBL'S success scale to real-world domains? This paper presents a formal theory of problem space structure that answers th...

Why exercise works magic.

Why Pattern Search Works

Pattern search methods are a class of direct search methods for nonlinear optimization. Since the introduction of the original pattern search methods in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they have remained popular with users due to their simplicity and the fact that they work well in practice on a variety of problems. More recently, the fact that they are provably convergent has generated renewed...

Why Globalization Works

Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, is a brilliant journalist and an able economist. Why Globalization Works is an excellent example of the author’s capacity for examination and analysis. The book is based on a series of articles on globalization that originally appeared in the FT, and on his Hayek Memorial Lecture to the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. Wol...

Why hydraulic tomography works?

Head measurements at a single observation well during a cross-hole pumping test carry a great amount of information about aquifer heterogeneity other than the average property of the aquifer as implied in Theis analysis of aquifer test. In this commentary, we use simple examples and a probabilistic reasoning approach based on Darcy’s law to unravel this information, buried in the results of qua...