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 Logic & Formal Reasoning


Toggling operators in computability logic

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Computability logic (CL) (see http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~giorgi/cl.html ) is a research program for redeveloping logic as a formal theory of computability, as opposed to the formal theory of truth which it has more traditionally been. Formulas in CL stand for interactive computational problems, seen as games between a machine and its environment; logical operators represent operations on such entities; and "truth" is understood as existence of an effective solution. The formalism of CL is open-ended, and may undergo series of extensions as the studies of the subject advance. So far three -- parallel, sequential and choice -- sorts of conjunction and disjunction have been studied. The present paper adds one more natural kind to this collection, termed toggling. The toggling operations can be characterized as lenient versions of choice operations where choices are retractable, being allowed to be reconsidered any finite number of times. This way, they model trial-and-error style decision steps in interactive computation. The main technical result of this paper is constructing a sound and complete axiomatization for the propositional fragment of computability logic whose vocabulary, together with negation, includes all four -- parallel, toggling, sequential and choice -- kinds of conjunction and disjunction. Along with toggling conjunction and disjunction, the paper also introduces the toggling versions of quantifiers and recurrence operations.


Electronic Geometry Textbook: A Geometric Textbook Knowledge Management System

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Electronic Geometry Textbook is a knowledge management system that manages geometric textbook knowledge to enable users to construct and share dynamic geometry textbooks interactively and efficiently. Based on a knowledge base organizing and storing the knowledge represented in specific languages, the system implements interfaces for maintaining the data representing that knowledge as well as relations among those data, for automatically generating readable documents for viewing or printing, and for automatically discovering the relations among knowledge data. An interface has been developed for users to create geometry textbooks with automatic checking, in real time, of the consistency of the structure of each resulting textbook. By integrating an external geometric theorem prover and an external dynamic geometry software package, the system offers the facilities for automatically proving theorems and generating dynamic figures in the created textbooks. This paper provides a comprehensive account of the current version of Electronic Geometry Textbook.


Simple Type Theory as Framework for Combining Logics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Simple type theory is suited as framework for combining classical and non-classical logics. This claim is based on the observation that various prominent logics, including (quantified) multimodal logics and intuitionistic logics, can be elegantly embedded in simple type theory. Furthermore, simple type theory is sufficiently expressive to model combinations of embedded logics and it has a well understood semantics. Off-the-shelf reasoning systems for simple type theory exist that can be uniformly employed for reasoning within and about combinations of logics.


Reasoning About the Transfer of Control

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

We present DCL-PC: a logic for reasoning about how the abilities of agents and coalitions of agents are altered by transferring control from one agent to another. The logical foundation of DCL-PC is CL-PC, a logic for reasoning about cooperation in which the abilities of agents and coalitions of agents stem from a distribution of atomic Boolean variables to individual agents -- the choices available to a coalition correspond to assignments to the variables the coalition controls. The basic modal constructs of DCL-PC are of the form `coalition C can cooperate to bring about phi'. DCL-PC extends CL-PC with dynamic logic modalities in which atomic programs are of the form `agent i gives control of variable p to agent j'; as usual in dynamic logic, these atomic programs may be combined using sequence, iteration, choice, and test operators to form complex programs. By combining such dynamic transfer programs with cooperation modalities, it becomes possible to reason about how the power of agents and coalitions is affected by the transfer of control. We give two alternative semantics for the logic: a `direct' semantics, in which we capture the distributions of Boolean variables to agents; and a more conventional Kripke semantics. We prove that these semantics are equivalent, and then present an axiomatization for the logic. We investigate the computational complexity of model checking and satisfiability for DCL-PC, and show that both problems are PSPACE-complete (and hence no worse than the underlying logic CL-PC). Finally, we investigate the characterisation of control in DCL-PC. We distinguish between first-order control -- the ability of an agent or coalition to control some state of affairs through the assignment of values to the variables under the control of the agent or coalition -- and second-order control -- the ability of an agent to exert control over the control that other agents have by transferring variables to other agents. We give a logical characterisation of second-order control.


The New Empiricism and the Semantic Web: Threat or Opportunity?

AAAI Conferences

Research effort, with its emphasis on evaluation and measurable progress, things began to change. Instead SHRDLU (WIN72) is perhaps the canonical example. of systems whose architecture and vocabulary were The rapid growth of efforts to found the next generation of based on linguistic theory (in this case acoustic phonetics), systems on general-purpose knowledge representation languages new approaches based on statistical modelling and Bayesian (I'm thinking of several varieties of semantic nets, probability emerged and quickly spread. "Every time I fire a from plain to partitioned, as well as KRL, KL-ONE and linguist my system's performance improves" (Fred Jellinek, their successors, ending (not yet, of course) with CYC (See head of speech recognition at IBM, c. 1980, latterly repudiated (BRA08) for all these) stumbled to a halt once their failure by Fred but widely attested). As advanced from resolution theorem provers through a number more and more problems are re-conceived as instances of of stages to the current proliferation of a range of Description the noisy channel model, the empiricist paradigm continually Logic'reasoners'; Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s there grew, so did the need to manage the impact of change and was real energy and optimism at the interface between computational conflict: enter'truth maintenance', subsequently renamed and theoretical linguistics, the overwhelming success'reason maintenance'. While still using some of But outflanking these'normal science' advances of AI, the terminology of linguistic theory, computational linguistics the paradigm shifters were coming up fast on the outside: practioners are increasingly detached from theory itself, over the last ten years machine learning has spread from which has suffered a, perhaps connected, loss of energy and small specialist niches such as speech recognition to become sense of progress.


Inductive Logic Programming in Databases: from Datalog to DL+log

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper we address an issue that has been brought to the attention of the database community with the advent of the Semantic Web, i.e. the issue of how ontologies (and semantics conveyed by them) can help solving typical database problems, through a better understanding of KR aspects related to databases. In particular, we investigate this issue from the ILP perspective by considering two database problems, (i) the definition of views and (ii) the definition of constraints, for a database whose schema is represented also by means of an ontology. Both can be reformulated as ILP problems and can benefit from the expressive and deductive power of the KR framework DL+log. We illustrate the application scenarios by means of examples. Keywords: Inductive Logic Programming, Relational Databases, Ontologies, Description Logics, Hybrid Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Systems. Note: To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).


On Action Theory Change

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

As historically acknowledged in the Reasoning about Actions and Change community, intuitiveness of a logical domain description cannot be fully automated. Moreover, like any other logical theory, action theories may also evolve, and thus knowledge engineers need revision methods to help in accommodating new incoming information about the behavior of actions in an adequate manner. The present work is about changing action domain descriptions in multimodal logic. Its contribution is threefold: first we revisit the semantics of action theory contraction proposed in previous work, giving more robust operators that express minimal change based on a notion of distance between Kripke-models. Second we give algorithms for syntactical action theory contraction and establish their correctness with respect to our semantics for those action theories that satisfy a principle of modularity investigated in previous work. Since modularity can be ensured for every action theory and, as we show here, needs to be computed at most once during the evolution of a domain description, it does not represent a limitation at all to the method here studied. Finally we state AGM-like postulates for action theory contraction and assess the behavior of our operators with respect to them. Moreover, we also address the revision counterpart of action theory change, showing that it benefits from our semantics for contraction.


Ptarithmetic

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The present article introduces ptarithmetic (short for "polynomial time arithmetic") -- a formal number theory similar to the well known Peano arithmetic, but based on the recently born computability logic (see http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~giorgi/cl.html) instead of classical logic. The formulas of ptarithmetic represent interactive computational problems rather than just true/false statements, and their "truth" is understood as existence of a polynomial time solution. The system of ptarithmetic elaborated in this article is shown to be sound and complete. Sound in the sense that every theorem T of the system represents an interactive number-theoretic computational problem with a polynomial time solution and, furthermore, such a solution can be effectively extracted from a proof of T. And complete in the sense that every interactive number-theoretic problem with a polynomial time solution is represented by some theorem T of the system. The paper is self-contained, and can be read without any previous familiarity with computability logic.


Guarded resolution for answer set programming

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We describe a variant of resolution rule of proof and show that it is complete for stable semantics of logic programs. We show applications of this result.


Alternation-Trading Proofs, Linear Programming, and Lower Bounds

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A fertile area of recent research has demonstrated concrete polynomial time lower bounds for solving natural hard problems on restricted computational models. Among these problems are Satisfiability, Vertex Cover, Hamilton Path, Mod6-SAT, Majority-of-Majority-SAT, and Tautologies, to name a few. The proofs of these lower bounds follow a certain proof-by-contradiction strategy that we call alternation-trading. An important open problem is to determine how powerful such proofs can possibly be. We propose a methodology for studying these proofs that makes them amenable to both formal analysis and automated theorem proving. We prove that the search for better lower bounds can often be turned into a problem of solving a large series of linear programming instances. Implementing a small-scale theorem prover based on this result, we extract new human-readable time lower bounds for several problems. This framework can also be used to prove concrete limitations on the current techniques.