Knowledge Acquisition by an Intelligent Acting Agent

We present a solution to McCarthy’s Second Telephone Number Problem. This problem requires an agent to: realize that it lacks some knowledge to complete a task; know the external knowledge sources it can use to obtain the knowledge; know how to obtain the missing knowledge from those sources; actually obtain the missing knowledge; and use the obtained knowledge to complete the task. We explain how a SNePS-based agent solves the problem, and the features of SNePS and the GLAIR architecture that facilitate the solution. These features include: the integration of reasoning and acting; the ability to reason about actions; and the ability to represent and reason about the knowledge contained in external knowledge sources. This latter feature is accomplished through the process of grounding of symbols of the knowledge representation in symbols of an external language.