Embracing Causality in Inducing the Effects of Actions

The following problem will be considered: from scattered examples on the behavior of a dynamic system induce a description of the system. For the induced description to be concise and modular, we use a generic action formalism based on causality, that is representable in logic programming. It is relatively simple to induce a description of a dynamic system that suffers from the frame problem. The known solutions to the frame problem require a non-monotonic formalism. Unfortunately induction under non-monotonic formalisms, e.g. normal logic programs, is not well understood yet. We present a method for induction under the non-monotonic behavior needed to solve the frame problem. Technically we introduce a causality predicate for the target fluent and induce a description of the causality of the fluent instead of the fluent itself. The description of causality together with the appropriate inertia axiom models the behavior of the original target fluent. The main advantage of this method is that the induction of the effects of actions can be made with well known induction methods on monotonic formalisms, such as Horn programs.