Neuro-evolution and natural deduction

Natural deduction is essentially a sequential decision task, similar to many game-playing tasks. Such a task is well suited to benefit from the techniques of neuro-evolution. Symbiotic Adaptive Neuro-Evolution (SANE) (Moriarty and Miikkulainen, 1996) has proven successful at evolving networks for such tasks. This paper shows that SANE can be used to evolve a natural deduction system on a neural network. Particularly, it shows that: incremental evolution through progressively more challenging problems results in more effective networks than does direct evolution; and an effective network can be evolved faster if the network is allowed to "brainstorm" or suggest any move regardless of its applicability, even though the highest-ranked valid move is always applied. This way evolution results in neural networks with human-like reasoning behavior.