Embracing Causality in Specifying the Indeterminate Effects of Actions

This paper makes the following two contributions to formal theories of actions: Showing that a causal minimization framework can be used effectively to specify the effects of indeterminate actions; and showing that for certain classes of such actions, regression, an effective computational mechanism, can be used to reason about them. Logical Preliminaries We shall investigate the problem in the framework of the situation calculus [8]. Our version of it employs a many sorted second-order language. We assume the following sorts: situation for situations, action for actions, fluent for propositional fluents, truth-value for truth values true and false, and object for everything else. We use the following domain independent predicates and functions:

Authors

• Fangzhen Lin

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