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Boundaries of abstraction

Lorenza Saitta , Jean-Daniel Zucker

pp. 117-139

In this chapter an informal treatment of the basic ideas of what, in our view, abstraction should is reported. In particular, the notion of abstraction is linked to that of information hiding, and the nature of the abstraction as an intensional property of system descriptions is suggested. Moreover, grounding abstraction on a configuration space (containing all the possible descriptions of a system, given a set of sensors) allows a clear distinction to be made among the cognate notions of abstraction, approximation and reformulation. Finally, the relationships between abstraction and generalization are discussed in depth.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-7052-6_5

Full citation:

Saitta, L. , Zucker, J.-D. (2013). Boundaries of abstraction, in Abstraction in artificial intelligence and complex systems, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 117-139.

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