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Fangzhen Lin and Yoav Shoham. Provably correct theories of action. Journal of the ACM, 42(2):293-320, March 1995. [BibTeX entry]
Abstract

We investigate logical formalization of the effects of actions in the in the situation calculus. We propose a formal criterion against which to evaluate theories of deterministic actions. We show how the criterion provides us a formal foundation upon which to tackle the frame problem, as well as its variant in the context of concurrent actions. Our main technical contributions are in formulating a wide class of monotonic causal theories that satisfy the criterion, and showing that each such theory can be reformulated succinctly in circumscription. Copyright 1995 by ACM, Inc.

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Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.2.3 [Artificial Intelligence]: Deduction and Theorem Proving -- circumscription; I.2.4 [Artificial Intelligence]: Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods -- the situation calculus

General Terms: Human Factors, Theory

Additional Key Words and Phrases: Concurrent actions, the frame problem, reasoning about actions, temporal reasoning

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