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On the Semantics of Deliberation in IndiGolog — from Theory to Implementation

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Abstract

We develop an account of the kind of deliberation that an agent that is doing planning or executing high-level programs under incomplete information must be able to perform. The deliberator's job is to produce a kind of plan that does not itself require deliberation to interpret. We characterize these as epistemically feasible programs: programs for which the executing agent, at every stage of execution, by virtue of what it knew initially and the subsequent readings of its sensors, always knows what step to take next towards the goal of completing the entire program. We formalize this notion and characterize deliberation in the situation calculus based IndiGolog agent programming language in terms of it. We also show that for certain classes of problems, which correspond to those with bounded solutions and those with solutions without sensing, the search for epistemically feasible programs can be limited to programs of a simple syntactic form. Finally, we discuss implementation issues and execution monitoring and replanning too.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G4, Canada

    Sebastian Sardina & Hector J. Levesque

  2. Dip. Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Via Salaria 113, 00198, Roma, Italy

    Giuseppe De Giacomo

  3. Department of Computer Science, York University, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada

    Yves Lespérance

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  1. Sebastian Sardina
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  2. Giuseppe De Giacomo
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  3. Yves Lespérance
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  4. Hector J. Levesque
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Sardina, S., De Giacomo, G., Lespérance, Y. et al. On the Semantics of Deliberation in IndiGolog — from Theory to Implementation. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 41, 259–299 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:AMAI.0000031197.13122.aa

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