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5.45 Definition
(a) 0108-001.gif.
(b) 0108-002.gif.
A conservative scientist thus never abandons a locally successful conjecture, that is, a conjecture that generates all the data seen to date. It is easy to verify that the collection of all finite languages and the collection. of all co-singleton languages can be identified by conservative scientists.
The following proposition implies that conservatism is restrictive.
5.46 Proposition (Angluin [6]) 0108-003.gif.
Proof: This argument is essentially the same as that for Proposition 5.25. Consider the class Image-1123.gif defined in that proof and suppose that Mj is a conservative scientist that identifies Image-1124.gif. As argued in the proof of Proposition 5.25, Mj must identify the text 0108-004.gif, for Lj. Thus there is a least pair 0108-005.gif such that Mj(T[n]) = i and 0108-006.gif. So 0108-007.gif is not identified by Mj, since on the text 0108-008.gif Mjmust continue to output i by the conservativeness of Mj.
It turns out that both global and class versions of conservatism render the same collections of languages identifiable, as implied by the next proposition. Its proof is discussed in Exercise 5-21.
5.47 Proposition [TxtEx]conservative = [TxtEx]clss-conservative.
§5.5.2 Generalization Strategies
We now consider a collection of strategies that require scientists to "improve" upon their successive conjectures. A scientist can begin by hypothesizing an index for a language smaller than the target language and then build to the target language. Such strategies are referred to as generalization strategies, and they model bottom-up or specific-to-general searches in artificial systems for empirical inquiry. For example, see systems such as Muggleton and Feng's Golem [134].
Three different generalization strategies have been proposed.
5.48 Definition (Jantke [99])

 
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