Closing the loop: heuristics for autonomous discovery

Autonomous discovery systems will be able to peruse very large databases more thoroughly than people can. In a companion paper by G.R. Livingston et al. (see ibid., p.385-92, 2001), we describe a general framework for autonomous systems. We present and evaluate heuristics for use in this framework. Although these heuristics were designed for a prototype system, we believe they provide good initial solutions to problems encountered when implementing fully autonomous discovery systems. As such, these heuristics may be used as the starting point for future research into fully autonomous discovery systems