Representation and reasoning about evolution of the world in the context of reasoning about actions

Chitta Baral and Nam Tran

Abstract

The first step in reasoning about actions and change involves reasoning about how the world would evolve if a certain action is executed in a certain state. Most research on this assume the evolution to be only a single step and focus on formulating the transition function that defines changes between states due to actions. In this paper we consider cases where the evolution is more than just a single change between one state and another. This is manifested when the execution of an action may trigger execution of other actions, or when multiple agents act on the environment following certain strategies.