Abstract
We apply Dijkstra's semantics for programming languages to formalize reasoning about action and change. The basic idea is to view an action A as a transformation which to each formula β assigns a formula α, with the intention that α represents the set of all initial states such that execution of A begun in any one of them is guaranteed to terminate in a state satisfying β.
The major strength of our approach is that it is very simple and computationally effective when compared with other proposals. Yet, it properly deals with a broad class of action scenarios. In particular, both temporal prediction and postdiction reasoning tasks can be solved without restricting initial or final states to be completely specified.
This research was supported by the ESPRIT Basic Research Action No. 6156 — DRUMS II and by the KBN Grant 2 2041 92 03.
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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Łukaszewicz, W., Madalińska-Bugaj, E. (1994). Program verification techniques as a tool for reasoning about action and change. In: Nebel, B., Dreschler-Fischer, L. (eds) KI-94: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 861. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58467-6_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58467-6_20
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