[comp.ai.digest] Seminar - Potential Histories and Inertial Theories

VAL@SAIL.STANFORD.EDU.UUCP (06/02/87)

                [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard.]


Yoav Shoham asked me to send a nice little poem to this mailing list:

                 With logics that are monotonic
                 Relations are nice but platonic
                 It's when you permit
                 Just models that fit     
                 That things become most erotonic

Yoav will also speak at our seminar on a related subject:

	    POTENTIAL HISTORIES AND INERTIAL THEORIES

			   Yoav Shoham
		     Thursday, June 4, 4:15pm
		       Bldg. 160, Room 161K

In previous talks I never managed to get to my solution to the 
extended-prediction problem (which is my name for the problem
subsuming the frame problem, a name that, shall we say, never
quite caught). I'll describe the intuitive concept of a potential
history, which has a strong McDermott-like persistence flavor.
I'll then embed the concept formally within the logic of 
chronological ignorance. I'll identify a class of theories, called
inertial theories, which extend causal theories, and yet which
a. are expressive enough to capture the notion of potential 
histories, and b. have the "unique model" and easy computability
properties.

My intention is this time to go into some detail. I'm still
not sure I have enough material for an hour, and if I don't
I'll ask the audience some questions on TMS's.

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