dependency-directed-backtracking-contradiction-resolution
IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/wiki-Reason_maintenance.md
Created 2026-08-24T17:11:22+00:00
When a contradiction is detected in a TMS, dependency-directed backtracking identifies the responsible statements and updates dependency records, rather than performing blind backtracking.
Summary
When the system detects that two of its conclusions can't both be true, it traces the conflict back to the specific statements that caused it and marks only those conclusions as unreliable, instead of undoing everything it has done since the last decision point. This makes conflict recovery surgical rather than destructive, so the system preserves all reasoning that is still valid and only retracts what is actually affected by the contradiction.