Worlds as a Unifying Element of Knowledge Representation

Cognitive systems with human-level intelligence must dis­play a wide range of abilities, including reasoning about the beliefs of others, hypothetical and future situations, quanti­fiers, probabilities, and counterfactuals. While each of these deals in some way with reasoning about alternative states of reality, no single knowledge representation framework deals with them in a unified and scalable manner. As a conse­quence it is difficult to build cognitive systems for domains that require each of these abilities to be used together. To enable this integration we propose a representational framework based on synchronizing beliefs between worlds. Using this framework, each of these tasks can be reformu­lated into a reasoning problem involving worlds. This demonstrates that the notions of worlds and inheritance can bring significant parsimony and broad new abilities to knowledge representation.