Intelligent assistant for using and operating computer systems capabilities to solve problems.

摘要

To help a user (21) program a computer target system (22) to solve problems, the computer system is provided with predefined capabilities and the user is provided with a knowledge system (20) that includes knowledge about applying the capabilities to effectively and efficiently solve the user's problems. The knowledge system (60, 61) provides automatic programming for solving problems within a particular domain, rejects problems that cannot be solved using the available capabilities of the target computer (22), and explains how and why a certain program was generated or why a program cannot be generated to solve a given problem. The knowledge system preferably collects information about the user's problem (63), designs a program that exploits the capabilities of the target computer system effectively to address the user's problem, encodes the program (74) into a form suitable for execution on the computer system, conveys the program to the computer system (22), explains to the user why particular elements of the program are included, and justifies its reasoning to the user (64). A specific embodiment pertaining to reflection seismology is described for advising a user on how to apply a set of program modules for performing static corrections on seismic data, and for generating a job deck for execution on a general-purpose digital computer.