> I assume what he is giving us is method names written in Java with "Treasure Island" as the single argument that return a value indicating the likelihood that "Treasure Island" is what the method name refers to.
The sample queries struck me as Prolog rather than Java, even before they mentioned it. Using Prolog would allow testing the combination of various propositions in addition to the individual values. This would imply that they derive a list of possible assertions, then try combinations of those assertions and see what values of X will match those assertions. How they avoid combinatorial explosion when testing all those assertion combinations, I have no idea, but it must involve ranking and pruning.
The sample queries struck me as Prolog rather than Java, even before they mentioned it. Using Prolog would allow testing the combination of various propositions in addition to the individual values. This would imply that they derive a list of possible assertions, then try combinations of those assertions and see what values of X will match those assertions. How they avoid combinatorial explosion when testing all those assertion combinations, I have no idea, but it must involve ranking and pruning.