SASW%MX.LCS.MIT.EDU@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU.UUCP (12/13/86)
Date: Thu 11 Dec 86 17:00:25-EST From: AHAAS at G.BBN.COM Another BBN AI Seminar: Leora Morgenstern of New York University will speak on "Foundations of a Logic of Knowledge, Action and Communication" at 10:30 on Thurday December 18 in the 2nd floor large conference room at 10 Moulton St. Her abstract: Most AI planners work on the assumption that they have complete knowledge of their problem domain, so that formulating a plan consists of searching through some pre-packaged list of action operators for an action sequence that achieves some desired goal. Real life planning rarely works this way because we usuallly don't have enough information to map out a detailed plan of action when we start out. Instead, we initially draw up a sketchy plan and fill in details as we proceed and gain more exact information about the world. This talk will present a formalism that is expressive enough to describe this flexible planning process. We begin by discussing various requirements that such a formalism must meet, and present a syntactic theory of knowledge that meets these requirements. We discuss the paradoxes, such as the Knower Paradox, that arise from syntactic treatments of knowledge, and propose a solution based on Kripke's solution of the Liar Paradox. Next, we present a theory of action that is powerful enough to describe partial plans and joint-effort plans. We demonstrate how we can integrate this theory with an Austinian theory of communicative acts. Finally, we give solutions to the Knowledge Preconditions and Ignorant Agent Problems as part of our integrated theory of planning. This talk will include comparisons of our theory with other syntactic and modal theories such as Konolige's and Moore's. We will demonstrate that our theory is powerful enough to solve classes of problems that these theories cannot handle.