A Review of Nonmonotonic Reasoning

It is possible to argue, relatively convincingly, that any research topic only begins to become mature when it appears on a syllabus somewhere. Once the topic has become well enough understood that it can be explained easily to paying customers, and stable enough that anyone teaching it is not likely to have to update his/her teaching materials every few months as new developments are reported, it can be considered to have arrived. Another reasonable indicator of the maturity of a subject, a milestone along the road to academic respectability, is the publication of a really good book on the subject -- not another research monograph but a book that consolidates what is already known, surveys and relates existing ideas, and maybe even unifies some of them. Grigoris Antoniou's Nonmonotonic Reasoning is just such a milestone -- well written, informative, and a good source of information on an important and complex subject. Since the idea was first mooted