LENAT@SU-SCORE.ARPA (11/28/83)
From: Doug Lenat <LENAT@SU-SCORE.ARPA>
[Reprinted from the SU-SCORE bboard.]
Tues, Nov 29, 3:45 MJH refreshments; 4:15 Terman Aud (lecture)
A COMPUTATIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR A QUALITATIVE PHYSICS--
Giving computers "common-sense" knowledge about physical mechanisms
John Seely Brown
Cognitive Sciences
Xerox, Palo Alto Research Center
Humans appear to use a qualitative causal calculus in reasoning about
the behavior of their physical environment. Judging from the kinds
of explanations humans give, this calculus is quite different from
the classical physics taught in classrooms. This raises questions as
to what this (naive) physics is like, how it helps one to reason
about the physical world and how to construct a formal calculus that
captures this kind of reasoning. An analysis of this calculus along
with a system, ENVISION, based on it will be covered.
The goals for the qualitative physics are i) to be far simpler than
classical physics and yet retain all the important distinctions
(e.g., state, oscillation, gain, momentum), ii) to produce causal
accounts of physical mechanisms, and (3) to provide a logic for
common-sense, causal reasoning for the next generation of expert
systems.
A new framework for examining causal accounts has been suggested
based on using collections of locally interacting processors to
represent physical mechanisms.