Designing the design machine through crunching symbolic descriptions and inheritance hierarchies

The author introduces some of the basic principles that have led to the development of a distinctive computing mechanism, called SPLINTER, programmed by the author. SPLINTER is a knowledge description language based around the notion of reasoning by means of classification. It is an evolving apparatus which is suitable for use in empirical, real-world selection domains, where there are decisions to be made between numerous viable or `approximately satisfactory´ solutions. Their immediate goal is to demonstrate the practicality of the language in a small, restricted domain of choosing between polymeric materials. Beyond this, they see their language as developing important computational abstraction strategies, which constitute the fundamentals of designing a design machine