Many systems that exhibit nonmonotonic behavior have been described and studied already in the literature. The general notion of nonmonotonic reasoning, though, has almost always been described only negatively, by the property it does not enjoy, i.e. monotonicity. We study here general patterns of nonmonotonic reasoning and try to isolate properties that could help us map the field of nonmonotonic reasoning by reference to positive properties. We concentrate on a number of families of nonmonotonic consequence relations, defined in the style of Gentzen [13]. Both proof-theoretic and semantic points of view are developed in parallel. The former point of view was pioneered by D. Gabbay in [10], while the latter has been advocated by Y. Shoham in [38]. Five such families are defined and characterized by representation theorems, relating the two points of view. One of the families of interest, that of preferential relations, turns out to have been studied by E. Adams in [2]. The pr...

This paper describes an implementation of the 3T robot architecture which has been under development for the last eightyears. The architecture uses three levels of abstraction and description languages whichare compatible between levels. The makeup of the architecture helps to coordinate planful activities with real-time behaviors for dealing with dynamic environments. In recent years, other architectures have been created with similar attributes but two features distinguish the 3T architecture: 1) a variety of useful software tools have been created to help implement this architecture on multiple real robots;, and 2) this architecture, or parts of it, have been implemented on a varietyofvery different robot systems using different processors, operating systems, effectors and sensor suites.

I present several computational complexity results for propositional STRIPS planning, i.e., STRIPS planning restricted to ground formulas. Different planning problems can be defined by restricting the type of formulas, placing limits on the number of pre- and postconditions, by restricting negation in pre- and postconditions, and by requiring optimal plans. For these types of restrictions, I show when planning is tractable (polynomial) and intractable (NPhard) . In general, it is PSPACE-complete to determine if a given planning instance has any solutions. Extremely severe restrictions on both the operators and the formulas are required to guarantee polynomial time or even NP-completeness. For example, when only ground literals are permitted, determining plan existence is PSPACE-complete even if operators are limited to two preconditions and two postconditions. When definite Horn ground formulas are permitted, determining plan existence is PSPACE-complete even if operators are limited t...

This paper concerns the empirical basis of causation, and addresses the following issues: 1. the clues that might prompt people to perceive causal relationships in uncontrolled observations. 2. the task of inferring causal models from these clues, and 3. whether the models inferred tell us anything useful about the causal mechanisms that underly the observations. We propose a minimal-model semantics of causation, and show that, contrary to common folklore, genuine causal influences can be distinguished from spurious covariations following standard norms of inductive reasoning. We also establish a sound characterization of the conditions under which such a distinction is possible. We provide an effective algorithm for inferred causation and show that, for a large class of data the algorithm can uncover the direction of causal influences as defined above. Finally, we address the issue of non-temporal causation. 1 Introduction The study of causation is central to the understanding of hum...

A fundamental problem in Knowledge Representation is the design of a logical language to express theories about actions and change. One of the most prominent proposals for such a language is John McCarthy's situation calculus, a formalism which views situations as branching towards the future. The situation calculus has been criticized for imposing severe representational limitations. For example, actions cannot be concurrent, properties change discretely, etc. In this thesis we show that many of these limitations can be overcome. Our work builds upon the discrete situation calculus and on Reiter's monotonic solution to the frame problem. A limitation of Reiter's approach is that it does not allow for state constraints. However, Lin and Reiter have made progress by providing a correctness criterion by which one can determine if an axiomatization can be said to solve the frame problem for theories that include state constraints.

: In certain areas of artificial intelligence there is need to represent continuous change and to make statements that are interpreted with respect to time intervals rather than time points. To this end we develop a modal temporal logic based on time intervals, a logic which can be viewed as a generalization of pointbased modal temporal logic. We discuss related logics, give an intuitive presentation of the new logic, and define its formal syntax and semantics. We make no assumption about the underlying nature of time, allowing it to be discrete (such as the natural numbers) or continuous (such as the rationals or the reals), linear or branching, complete (such as the reals) or not (such as the rationals). We show, however, that there are formulas in the logic that allow us to distinguish all these situations. We also give a translation of our logic into first-order logic, which allows us to apply some results on first-order logic to our modal one. Finally, we consider the difficulty o...

. This paper presents an overview of the development of the field of temporal and modal logic programming. We review temporal and modal logic programming languages under three headings: (1) languages based on interval logic, (2) languages based on temporal logic, and (3) languages based on (multi)modal logics. The overview includes most of the major results developed, and points out some of the similarities, and the differences, between languages and systems based on diverse temporal and modal logics. The paper concludes with a brief summary and discussion. Categories: Temporal and Modal Logic Programming. 1 Introduction In logic programming, a program is a set of Horn clauses representing our knowledge and assumptions about some problem. The semantics of logic programs as developed by van Emden and Kowalski [96] is based on the notion of the least (minimum) Herbrand model and its fixed-point characterization. As logic programming has been applied to a growing number of problem domai...

. This short paper relates the conditional object-based and possibility theorybased approaches for reasoning with conditional statements pervaded with exceptions, to other methods in nonmonotonic reasoning which have been independently proposed: namely, Lehmann's preferential and rational closure entailments which obey normative postulates, the infinitesimal probability approach, and the conditional (modal) logics-based approach. All these methods are shown to be equivalent with respect to their capabilities for reasoning with conditional knowledge although they are based on different modeling frameworks. It thus provides a unified understanding of nonmonotonic consequence relations. More particularly, conditional objects, a purely qualitative counterpart to conditional probabilities, offer a very simple semantics, based on a 3-valued calculus, for the preferential entailment, while in the purely ordinal setting of possibility theory both the preferential and the rational closure entai...

this paper we introduce Prohairetic Deontic Logic (PDL), a preference-based

. In this paper we introduce and formalise dynamic goal hierarchies. We begin with a formal definition of goals, according to which they are rational desires. In particular, we require that an agent's goals are coherent; that is, that the agent believes that each goal is jointly realisable with all of the goals which the agent considers to be more important. Thus an agent's goals form a hierarchy, and new goals are defined with reference to it. We then show how preferential entailment can be used to formalise the rational revision of goals and goal hierarchies. 1 Introduction Stan is writing a paper for a conference. On Monday he decides to work on the paper throughout the week and to finish it on Sunday. He also decides to take Saturday o# in order to go to the beach with his family. He considers that it is more important to finish the paper, but he believes that going to the beach for the day on Saturday will not prevent him from doing so. On Tuesday Stan works on the paper and his...