Inductive synthesis of functional programs: universal planning, folding of finite programs, and schema abstraction by analogical reasoning

Because of its promise to support human programmers in developing correct and efficient program code and in reasoning about programs, automatic program synthesis has attracted the attention of researchers and professionals since the 1970s.

This book focusses on inductive program synthesis, and especially on the induction of recursive functions; it is organized into three parts on planning, inductive program synthesis, and analogical problem solving and learning. Besides methodological issues in inductive program synthesis, emphasis is placed on its applications to control rule learning for planning. Furthermore, relations to problem solving and learning in cognitive psychology are discussed.