There are many commercial tools that address various aspects of the Year 20
00 problem. None of these tools, however, addresses the closely related lea
p-year problem. In this paper, we provide experimental results that suggest
that the leap-year problem can be addressed by plan-based techniques for a
utomated concept recovery. In particular, we provide representative code fr
agments illustrating the leap-year problem, and we show the results of an e
mpirical study that provides evidence that a plan-based approach can effici
ently recognize both correct and incorrect leap-year computations and that
the needed plan library is likely to be tractable in size. This paper furth
ermore argues that plan-based techniques are in fact mature enough to make
a significant contribution to the Year 2000 problem itself, despite none of
the existing tools making any documented use of these plan-based technique
s. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.