Knowledge in Action: Logical Foundations for Specifying and Implementing Dynamical Systems - Hardcover

Reiter, Raymond

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262182181 ISBN 13: 9780262182188

Publisher: Mit Pr, 2001

Synopsis

Modeling and implementing dynamical systems is a central problem in artificialintelligence, robotics, software agents, simulation, decision and control theory, and many otherdisciplines. In recent years, a new approach to representing such systems, grounded in mathematicallogic, has been developed within the AI knowledge-representation community.

Thisbook presents a comprehensive treatment of these ideas, basing its theoretical and implementationfoundations on the situation calculus, a dialect of first-order logic. Within this framework, itdevelops many features of dynamical systems modeling, including time, processes, concurrency,exogenous events, reactivity, sensing and knowledge, probabilistic uncertainty, and decision theory.It also describes and implements a new family of high-level programming languages suitable forwriting control programs for dynamical systems. Finally, it includes situation calculusspecifications for a wide range of examples drawn from cognitive robotics, planning, simulation,databases, and decision theory, together with all the implementation code for these examples. Thiscode is available on the book's Web site.

About this title

About the Author

Raymond Reiter is Professor and Co-Director of the Cognitive Robotics Project in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

Review

Reiter's new book, Knowledge in Action, offers the first systematic account of the logical approach to cognitive robotics, a field that he and his colleagues have developed over the past decade. The unique feature of this approach rests in its capacity to admit specifications in the form of meaningful knowledge fragments, to piece those fragments together by logical and probabilistic inferences, and to use those inferences to guide both manipulative and perceptual actions by programmable agents. A must for anyone concerned with the foundations of commonsense knowledge or the design of autonomous dynamical systems.

(Judea Pearl, Department of Computer Science, University of California)

This book is a masterful integration of several decades of work on first-order logic, situation calculus, logic programming, and semantics of time and knowledge. The result is a unified, well-thought-out, and systematic approach to dynamical systems that spans much of modern computer science and AI.

(Johan van Benthem, University of Amsterdam)

This book describes a thoroughly developed logic- and situation-calculus-based system for problem solving and planning. Its emphasis on theory is especially important for the ambitious student who wants to look beyond immediate applications toward the goal of human-level artificial intelligence.

(John McCarthy, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Stanford University)

This outstanding work should be on the shelf of anyone concerned with logical control of physical processes.

(Anil Nerode, Goldwin Smith Professor of Mathematics, Cornell University)

Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262182181
• ISBN 13: 9780262182188
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448