The problem of selecting an approach based on prior success

This article is the twenty-sixth of a series of articles discussing various open research problems in automated reasoning. The problem posed for research asks one to find criteria for choosing from among previously answered questions a question that dictates the approach to take for attacking the problem of current interest. Especially because the better automated reasoning programs often offer a wide range of choices for representation, inference rule, and strategy, a solution to the proposed problem would materially reduce the difficulty of using these powerful aids for research.This work was supported by the Office of Scientific Computing, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract W-31-109-Eng-38.