Backward Chaining
A goal-driven, top-down approach to reasoning where a system starts with a goal or conclusion and works backward to find the necessary conditions and rules that lead to that goal.
Areas of application
- Artificial intelligence
- Expert systems
- Diagnostic systems
- Automated reasoning
- Robotics
- Natural language processing
- Cognitive computing
- Machine learning
Example
An expert system using backward chaining to diagnose a medical condition might start with the conclusion of a patient having a particular disease. The system would then work backward to find the necessary conditions, such as symptoms or test results, that led to that conclusion.