Dynamic Logic A Review

Remember that time and space are a priori conditions of human perception in Kant's philosophy. On the one hand, time is inherent to action and change; on the other, action and change are possible because of the passage of time. According to McDermott, "Dealing with time correctly would change everything in an AI program" (McDermott 1982, p. 101). It should not be surprising then that temporal reasoning has always been a very important topic in many fields of AI, particularly areas dealing with change, causality, and action (planning, diagnosis, natural language understanding, and so on). AI developments based on temporal reasoning lead to general theories about time and action, such as McDermott's (1982) temporal logic, Vilain's (1982) theory of time, and Allen's (1984) theory of action and time. Work on the application of these results has taken place in fields such as planning and medical knowledge-based systems. However, action and change are not an exclusive interest of AI.