Automating Commonsense Reasoning for Elementary Physical Science

A fundamental part of human experience is the interaction with physical materials of many different kinds: rigid solids, non-rigid solids of many different kinds (e.g. cloth, string, rubber bands, springs, and so on), liquids and gasses. The rich pre-scientific understanding of these materials acquired by every child at an early age is critically important, both because it enables a person to deal effectively, in daily life and in more specialized activities, with a world full of these materials, and because this fundamental physical understanding serves as a grounding for more sophisticated knowledge of many kinds. The implementation of this body of knowledge in an intelligent knowledge base and the analysis of the knowledge that would be entailed in this implementation would have immense value for many different purposes: