Speciication-by-demonstration: the Viccs Interface

A goal of the Multi-tac project is to make combinatorial problem-solving technology available to users who have no formal training in AI or OR. To achieve this aim, we have built a system , ViCSS (Visual Constraint Speciication System) that enables users to specify problems graphically. To simplify the speciication process, ViCSS relies heavily on programming-by-demonstration techniques. We believe, however, that one key to making programming-by-demonstration succeed for our application is to constrain the generalization process so that the system makes only \simple", easy-to-understand generalizations. In this paper we describe several design decisions that enable us to achieve this end, and illustrate them in the context of an extended example.