VAL@SAIL.STANFORD.EDU.UUCP (12/10/86)
Commonsense and Non-Monotonic Reasoning Seminar CONCEPTS DEFINED VIA APPROXIMATE THEORIES John McCarthy Thursday, December 11, 4pm Jordan 050 Some important concepts for AI including "it can", "it believes" and counterfactuals may be precisely definable in theories that approximate reality in a generalized sense. Useful approximate theories of action are typically non-deterministic even when they approximate deterministic systems. The concepts are useful to the extent that the approximate theory answers questions about the real world, but they often become imprecise when attempts are made to define them directly in real world terms. The lecture will discuss the sense of approximation, give some examples, and make connections with the previous discussion of contexts. Some of the material is discussed in my paper "Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines".