Representing and Computing Temporally Scoped Beliefs

Abstract

Planning effective courses of action requires mak-ing predictions about what the world may be like at the time the actions are to be performed. Making these predictions requires a temporal rep-resentation, and-assuming a world that is not entirely predictable and an agent that is not omniscient- a representation of the uncertainty that will characterize its incomplete knowledge of the world. We provide in this paper a repre-sentation and calculus for computing an agent’s strength of belief in a proposition at a point in time, based on (possibly imperfect) observations about that proposition and information about the tendency of the proposition to persist over time. 1