The bacon system is based on Scientific Discovery: Computational Explorations of the Creative Processes by Pat Langley, Herbert A. Simon, Gary L. Bradshaw, and Jan M. Zytkow, 1987, MIT Press. Langley et. al. created a system they called bacon and discussed it in Scientific Discovery. This bacon implementation is my attempt at a reconstruction in Prolog of that system based only on reading their book.
bacon analyzes a table of data to determine a law that describes it, a relationship among the values in the rows that is the same for all of the rows in the table.
The general topic is discussed at:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-discovery/
I originally implemented this version of bacon in 1990's in MacProlog32, then ported that to XGP. This is a port to Logtalk for any Prolog backend.
There are several examples defined in test_data_set.lgt. You can list their
names by setof(ID, bacon_loader::bacon_test_id(ID), IDs).
To run the 'linear' example with GNU Prolog backend:
$ cd <bacon_project_dir>
$ gplgt
| ?- logtalk_load(loader).
| ?- bacon_loader::set_test_parameters(linear).
yes
| ?- bacon_loader::run_test(linear).
Test: linear
SPECIFIED PARAMETERS:
Max. number of search variables = 10
Constant tolerance = 0.001 (recommended)
Linear tolerance = 0.001 (recommended)
Proportional tolerance = 0.01 (recommended)
Start to determine regularities.
Determine regularities for: [x,y]
[[1,2],[3,4],[2,3]]
slope(x,y) = 1.0
intercept(x,y) = 1.0
Time to find law: 0.0010000000000000009 seconds.
(1 ms) yes
| ?-
The 'ideal_gas' example fails to find a law (sigh).
The bacon analysis is very sensitive to the tolerance parameters. This sensitivity is chaotic.