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10:30am, Thursday July 15
The blocks world, situations, the frame problem and circum.

Abstract: Our goal is a database of common sense facts about the preconditions
and effects of actions that could be used by any program that had to
do such actions to achieve its goals.  The point is that the facts
(expressed in logic) should be generally applicable and not specialized
to a particular application.  Today artificial intelligence is still far
from being able to create such data bases.Chess as the Drosophila of artificial intelligence

Making chess the Drosophila of artificial intelligence

Chess and the formalization of concurrent action.

1. The Berliner thesis problem.

2. Consider two pawns vs. a king on a very large board.  We
suppose that the two pawns are on the same rank, and the king
is in an arbitrary position.  It seems that if the two pawns
are far enough apart, one of them will queen assuming that the
side with the pawns is to move.  Formalize this.
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Seminar by John McCarthy at 10:30, 1982 July 15 at SRI
Call Bob Moore at SRI if you need help getting in.

Axiomatizing of the blocks world using situations and circumscription

	One long term goal of AI is a general purpose database for
common sense facts about the effects of actions and other events.
Indeed a program with common sense must be able to apply general
knowledge to any problem that comes up and cannot expect some human
to give a presentation of the facts about (say) moving objects
specialized to the particular problem.

	The paper will present some recent progress towards this goal in
the area of the effects of actions that move objects, i.e. the blocks
world.  Using circumscription and considerable reification reduces
the frame and qualification problems greatly.  While more general
purpose than previous formalizations, there are still many limitations.

	Both the new methods and their limitations will be discussed.