Abstract

The need for a coherent answer to this question has become increasingly urgent in the past few years, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence. There, both logical and probabilistic techniques are routinely applied in an attempt to solve complex problems such as parsing natural language and determining the way proteins fold. The hope is that some combination of logic and probability will produce better solutions. After all, both natural language and protein molecules have some structure that admits logical representation and reasoning; yet inherent uncertainties also demand the use of probabilistic methods: this structure is only partially known and does not in any case fully determine a solution—context or environment also play a role.