“THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE”

Some Things Algorithms Cannot Do

A new, ‘behavioral’ theory of algorithms, intending to capture algorithms at their intended abstraction level, has been developed in this century in a series of papers by Y. Gurevich, A. Blass and others, motivated initially by the goal of establishing the ASM thesis. A viable theory of algorithms must have its limitative results, algorithms, however abstract, cannot do just anything. We establ...

The more things change.

Things That Can and Things That Cannot Be Done in PRA

Some Things Must Not Change.

The past three months have been a season of tremendous change, and many of us have been surprised by the political events that have taken place. January heralds a change in administration for the United States, and the future seems uncertain. I sense that change is going to be the new normal, and we have to be able to cope with it-and with each other-for a long time. What I want to talk about i...

Things That Change by Themselves

Some fluents (for instance, time) change even after events that are not assumed to affect them (such as the action wait). We propose a formal-ization of the "commonsense law of inertia" in the situation calculus that allows us to describe such fluents. 1 Introduction The frame problem in Artificial Intelligence is the problem of specifying formally "what doesn't change when an event occurs" in ...