This article proposes a solution to the problem of obtaining plausibility information, which is necessary to perform belief revision: given a sequence of revisions, together with their results, derive a possible initial order that has generated them; this is different from the usual assumption of starting from an all-equal initial order and modifying it by a sequence of revisions. Four semantics for iterated revision are considered: natural, restrained, lexicographic and reinforcement. For each, a necessary and sufficient condition to the existence of an order generating a given history of revisions and results is proved. Complexity is proved coNP complete in all cases but one (reinforcement revision with unbounded sequence length).

In this section, I propose another, quite different view about the nature To choose their actions, reasoning programs must be able to make assumptions and subsequently of reasoning. I incorporate some new concepts into this view, and the combination revise their beliefs when discoveries contradict these assumptions. The Truth Maintenance System overcomes the problems exhibited by the conventional view.

When you lose a game of chess to a computer then don't pretend that you didn't think at the game.

In this paper we will be concerned with such reasoning in its most general form, that is, in inferences that are defeasible: given more information, we may retract them. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a form of non-monotonic inference based on the notion of a partial model of the world. We take partial models to reflect our partial knowledge of the true state of affairs. We then define non-monotonic inference as the process of filling in unknown parts of the model with conjectures: statements that could turn out to be false, given more complete knowledge. To take a standard example from default reasoning: since most birds can fly, if Tweety is a bird it is reasonable to assume that she can fly, at least in the absence of any information to the contrary. We thus have some justification for filling in our partial picture of the world with this conjecture. If our knowledge includes the fact that Tweety is an ostrich, then no such justification exists, and the conjecture must be retracted.

This paper describes some work on automatically generating finite counterexamples in topology, and the use of counterexamples to speed up proof discovery in intermediate analysis, and gives some examples theorems where human provers are aided in proof discovery by the use of examples.

We present a new approach to deductive design synthesis, the Residue Approach, in which designs are represented as sets of constraints. Previous approaches, such as PROLOG [181 or the work of Manna and WaWinger [111, express designs as bindings on single terms. We give a complete and sound procedure for Ending sets of propositions constituting a legal design. The size of the search space of the procedure and the advantages and disadvantages of the Residue Approach are analysed. In particular we show how Residue can avoid backtracking caused by making design decisions of overly coarse granularity. In contrast, it is awkward for the single term approaches to do the same. In addition we give a rule for constraint propagation in deductive synthesis, and show its use in pruning the design space. Finally, Residue is related to other work, in particular, to Default Logic [16] and to Assumption-Based Truth Maintenance [1].

IDijkstra 19591 Dijkstra, E., NA Note on Two Problems in Connection with Graphs," Numeri.scht'

Data association, the problem of reasoning over correspondence between targets and measurements, is a fundamental problem in tracking. This paper presents a graphical model formulation of data association and applies an approximate inference method, belief propagation (BP), to obtain estimates of marginal association probabilities. We prove that BP is guaranteed to converge, and bound the number of iterations necessary. Experiments reveal a favourable comparison to prior methods in terms of accuracy and computational complexity.

How can we tell when accounts are fake or real in a social network? And how can we tell which accounts belong to liberal, conservative or centrist users? Often, we can answer such questions and label nodes in a network based on the labels of their neighbors and appropriate assumptions of homophily ("birds of a feather flock together") or heterophily ("opposites attract"). One of the most widely used methods for this kind of inference is Belief Propagation (BP) which iteratively propagates the information from a few nodes with explicit labels throughout a network until convergence. One main problem with BP, however, is that there are no known exact guarantees of convergence in graphs with loops. This paper introduces Linearized Belief Propagation (LinBP), a linearization of BP that allows a closed-form solution via intuitive matrix equations and, thus, comes with convergence guarantees. It handles homophily, heterophily, and more general cases that arise in multi-class settings. Plus, it allows a compact implementation in SQL. The paper also introduces Single-pass Belief Propagation (SBP), a "localized" version of LinBP that propagates information across every edge at most once and for which the final class assignments depend only on the nearest labeled neighbors. In addition, SBP allows fast incremental updates in dynamic networks. Our runtime experiments show that LinBP and SBP are orders of magnitude faster than standard

The AGM framework is the benchmark approach in belief change. Since the framework assumes an underlying logic containing classical Propositional Logic, it can not be applied to systems with a logic weaker than Propositional Logic. To remedy this limitation, several researchers have studied AGM-style contraction and revision under the Horn fragment of Propositional Logic (i.e., Horn logic). In this paper, we contribute to this line of research by investigating the Horn version of the AGM entrenchment-based contraction. The study is challenging as the construction of entrenchment-based contraction refers to arbitrary disjunctions which are not expressible under Horn logic. In order to adapt the construction to Horn logic, we make use of a Horn approximation technique called Horn strengthening. We provide a representation theorem for the newly constructed contraction which we refer to as entrenchment-based Horn contraction. Ideally, contractions defined under Horn logic (i.e., Horn contractions) should be as rational as AGM contraction. We propose the notion of Horn equivalence which intuitively captures the equivalence between Horn contraction and AGM contraction. We show that, under this notion, entrenchment-based Horn contraction is equivalent to a restricted form of entrenchment-based contraction.