VAL@SAIL.STANFORD.EDU.UUCP (04/27/87)
AUTOMATIC DERIVATION OF THE EQUATION OF MOTION OF A PENDULUM Thursday, April 30, 4:15pm Bldg. 160, Room 161K Michael Beeson (beeson@csli.stanford.edu) San Jose State University Some knowledge of elementary physics has been formalized in first-order logic. The domain of discourse includes physical objects and their relations, mathematical formulas, and the semantic relation between formulas and objects. The knowledge in question has been written in Prolog and is sufficient to support an automatic derivation of the differential equation of motion of a pendulum. The inference engine makes use of the Knuth-Bendix method and also of a symbolic computation system for algebra and calculus. Perhaps this is the first program to use both knowledge representation in logic and symbolic computation.