Program plan recognition for year 2000 tools

There are many commercial tools that address various aspects of the Year 2000 problem. None of these tools, however, addresses the closely related leap-year problem. In this paper, we provide experimental results that suggest that the leap-year problem can be addressed by plan-based techniques for automated concept recovery. In particular, we provide representative code fragments illustrating the leap-year problem, and we show the results of an empirical study that provides evidence that a plan-based approach can efficiently recognize both correct and incorrect leap-year computations and that the needed plan library is likely to be tractable in size. This paper furthermore argues that plan-based techniques are in fact mature enough to make a significant contribution to the Year 2000 problem itself, despite none of the existing tools making any documented use of these plan-based techniques.