Understanding Linkages  Howard E. Shrobe  Mechanical linkages
are used to transmit and transform motion. In this paper we
investigate what it means for a program to "understand" a
linkage. Our system extracts its understanding by analyzing the
results of a numerical simulation of the mechanism, finding
interesting qualitative features, looking for symbolic
relationships between these features and conjecturing a causal
relationship between them. Our system is capable of
understanding a variety of mechanisms, producing explanations
very much like those in standard texts.