Representing Action: Indeterminacy and Ramifications

universit a di genova facolt a di ingegneria dipartimento informatica sistemistica telematica Abstract We deene and study a high-level language for describing actions, more expressive than the action language A introduced by Gelfond and Lif-schitz. The new language, AR, allows us to describe actions with indirect eeects (ramiications), nondeterministic actions, and actions that may be impossible to execute. It has symbols for nonpropositional uents and for the uents that are exempt from the commonsense law of inertia. Temporal projection problems speciied using the language AR can be represented as nested abnormality theories based on the situation calculus.