A Survey on Reasoning about Action

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey on Reasoning about Action"

by

Mr. Haodi Zhang


Abstract:

Describing changes caused by the execution of actions is an old and central 
task in logic-based Artificial Intelligence. Several classical specific 
problems were encountered during the first attempts on representation of action 
effects. This survey starts with describing these problems, Frame Problem, 
Qualification Problem and Ramification Problem, and then follows two lines of 
research works (Lin's and McCain and Turner's) to see how researchers formalize 
a dynamic reasoning system and represent the effects of actions to solve these 
problems for reasoning.

Lin's work is based on situation calculus, which is first introduced by John 
McCarthy in 1963 and then used by Reiter to solve the Frame Problem (successor 
state axioms). Lin introduced a new fluent and corresponding method to embraced 
causality, which plays a central role in commonsense reasoning about action, 
and successfully solved the Ramification Problem if the theory has no cycle in 
causal dependency. McCain and Turner then defined a language for representing 
causal knowledge and described a general approach to formalizing action domains 
in it, known as McCain and Turner's causal theory. Meanwhile, there are some 
other works on knowledge representation for actions, such as Fluent Calculus, 
also a prominent variant of the Situation Calculus, Event Calculus and a number 
of other approaches.

Works on comparative analyses of the expressiveness of different approaches and 
translations from one specific language into another one is also included in 
this survey. Thielscher proposed afterward a unifying action calculus to 
provide a uniform method for translating a variety of specific formalisms into 
each other.


Date:                   Monday, 16 May 2011

Time:                   10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 3494
                         lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Prof. Fangzhen Lin (Supervisor)
                         Prof. Qiang Yang (Chairperson)
  			Prof. Dit-Yan Yeung
  			Prof. Nevin Zhang


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