THE DECLARATIVE REPRESENTATION AND PROCEDURAL SIMULA!LOU OF CAUSALITY IN PHYSICAL MECHANISMS

third, the theory could provide the basis of interactive design systems in which engineers specify high level goals to the system, which then does the design. Completely automatic "mechanisms invention " is within the realm of possibility and, we feel, would closely resemble the behavior of current-day problem solving and program synthesis theories. Finally, a future application might be to use the representation as a sort of Dewey Decimal System of cause-effect pattern classification. J. Background and Related Work There are many ways to approach the description of a mechanism. Most in the. past (e.g. [Jwl], [LBIU] , [RJS1], [SL1J, and [WBL1J) have tended to be more analytical in their approach. In analytical simulations, the mechanism is typically described by parameterizing it in