Topic
Qualification problem
About: Qualification problem is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 77 publications have been published within this topic receiving 6818 citations.
Papers published on a yearly basis
Papers
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the problem of reasoning about whether a strategy will achieve a goal in a deterministic world and present a method to construct a sentence of first-order logic which will be true in all models of certain axioms if and only if a certain strategy can achieve a certain goal.
Abstract: A computer program capable of acting intelligently in the world must have a general representation of the world in terms of which its inputs are interpreted. Designing such a program requires commitments about what knowledge is and how it is obtained. Thus, some of the major traditional problems of philosophy arise in artificial intelligence. More specifically, we want a computer program that decides what to do by inferring in a formal language that a certain strategy will achieve its assigned goal. This requires formalizing concepts of causality, ability, and knowledge. Such formalisms are also considered in philosophical logic. The first part of the paper begins with a philosophical point of view that seems to arise naturally once we take seriously the idea of actually making an intelligent machine. We go on to the notions of metaphysically and epistemo-logically adequate representations of the world and then to an explanation of can, causes, and knows in terms of a representation of the world by a system of interacting automata. A proposed resolution of the problem of freewill in a deterministic universe and of counterfactual conditional sentences is presented. The second part is mainly concerned with formalisms within which it can be proved that a strategy will achieve a goal. Concepts of situation, fluent, future operator, action, strategy, result of a strategy and knowledge are formalized. A method is given of constructing a sentence of first-order logic which will be true in all models of certain axioms if and only if a certain strategy will achieve a certain goal. The formalism of this paper represents an advance over McCarthy (1963) and Green (1969) in that it permits proof of the correctness of strategies that contain loops and strategies that involve the acquisition of knowledge; and it is also somewhat more concise. The third part discusses open problems in extending the formalism of part 2. The fourth part is a review of work in philosophical logic in relation to problems of artificial intelligence and a discussion of previous efforts to program ‘general intelligence’ from the point of view of this paper.
3,920 citations
Proceedings Article•
21 Aug 1988TL;DR: It is shown that the PWA fails to solve the frame, ramification, and qualification problems, even with additional simplifying restrictions not imposed by Ginsberg and Smith.
Abstract: Ginsberg and Smith [6, 7] propose a new method for reasoning about action, which they term a possible worlds approach (PWA). The PWA is an elegant, simple, and potentially very powerful domain-independent technique that has proven fruitful in other areas of AI [13, 5]. In the domain of reasoning about action, Ginsberg and Smith offer the PWA as a solution to the frame problem (What facts about the world remain true when an action is performed?) and its dual, the ramification problem [3] (What facts about the world must change when an action is performed?). In addition, Ginsberg and Smith offer the PWA as a solution to the qualification problem (When is it reasonable to assume that an action will succeed?), and claim for the PWA computational advantages over other approaches such as situation calculus.
Here and in [16] I show that the PWA fails to solve the frame, ramification, and qualification problems, even with additional simplifying restrictions not imposed by Ginsberg and Smith. The cause of the failure seems to be a lack of distinction in the PWA between the state of the world and the description of the state of the world. I introduce a new approach to reasoning about action, called the possible models approach, and show that the possible models approach works as well as the PWA on the examples of [6, 7] but does not suffer from its deficiencies.
529 citations
TL;DR: This paper provides axioms for a simple problem in temporal reasoning which has long been identified as a case of default reasoning, thus presumably amenable to representation in nonmonotonic logic, and finds that the logics considered are inherently incapable of representing this kind ofdefault reasoning.
515 citations
1 Oct 1987
TL;DR: This chapter further explains this division of AI, explains some of the epistemological problems, and presents some new results and approaches.
Abstract: Publisher Summary Artificial intelligence (AI) problem has been divided into two parts—an epistemological part and a heuristic part. This chapter further explains this division, explains some of the epistemological problems, and presents some new results and approaches. The epistemological part of AI studies what kinds of facts about the world are available to an observer with given opportunities to observe, how these facts can be represented in the memory of a computer, and what rules permit legitimate conclusions to be drawn from these facts. It leaves aside the heuristic problems of how to search spaces of possibilities and how to match patterns. Considering epistemological problems separately has the following advantages. (1) The same problems of what information is available to an observer and what conclusions can be drawn from information arise in connection with a variety of problem solving tasks. (2) A single solution of the epistemological problems can support a wide variety of heuristic approaches to a problem. (3) AI is a very difficult scientific problem, so there are great advantages in finding parts of the problem that can be separated out and separately attacked.
400 citations
TL;DR: This paper provides a solution to the frame problem, and to the related problem that it is not always reasonable to explicitly specify all of the consequences of actions, by keeping a single model of the world that is updated when actions are performed.
337 citations
Related Topics (5)
Performance Metrics
| Year | Papers |
|---|---|
| 2019 | 2 |
| 2018 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2 |
| 2016 | 1 |
| 2013 | 3 |
| 2012 | 1 |