Rome, Italy
Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
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Jan 11-13
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Logic programming solution to the frame problem
Vladimir LifschitzUniversity of Texas at Austin
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Research on the frame problem included attempts to formalize the "commonsense law of inertia": whatever we know about the state of affairs before executing an action can be presumed, by default, to hold after the action as well. A counterexample, known now as the Yale Shooting Scenario, showed that early attempts to make the idea of commonsense inertia precise were unsuccessful. A way to overcome that difficulty was suggested by experience with the use of Prolog and by work on the semantics of negation in logic programming.
Solving computational problems related to the commonsense law of inertia became possible when methods used in the design of SAT solvers were applied to nonmonotonic extensions of propositional logic. This technology has been applied, in particular, to verifying the reliability of the Reaction Control System of the Space Shuttle.
Brief author biography
Vladimir Lifschitz is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He received a degree in mathematics from the Steklov Mathematical Institute (St. Petersburg, Russia) in 1971 and emigrated to the United States in 1976. His research interests are in the areas of computational logic and knowledge representation.