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C00002 00002	mathso[f82,jmc]		Abstract of talk for American Mathematical Society
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mathso[f82,jmc]		Abstract of talk for American Mathematical Society

	The most straightforward mathematical logical approach to
artificial intelligence is the following.  We build a data base of
general common sense facts about the world in the form of sentences
is a suitable first order language.  The facts and goals of a
particular situation are then expressed as sentences in the same
language.  A suitable computer program then derives a sentence
whose import is that with the given facts and goals a certain
action is appropriate.  Attempts to carry this out are far from
achieving human level common sense intelligence but have led to
several new logical formalisms and present problems that should
be of technical interest to mathematical logicians
including the following:

	1. Formalized non-monotonic reasoning.  Unlike logical deduction,
common sense reasoning often reaches conclusions that would not be
reached with increased premisses.  One way, called circumscription,
of formalizing this is to assume that certain predicates have the
minimal extension compatible with the premisses.  In some sense, this
is a formalization of Ockham's razor.

	2. Present modal logical formalisms are too weak to draw
common sense conclusions about what people don't know.  Attempts
to strengthen often lead to inconsistency.

	3. Common sense requires the ability to reason while still
confused about the fundamental meaning of the concepts being used.
Even this may be subject to mathematically interesting formalization.