An Action Language Based on Causal Explanation: Preliminary Report

Abstract

Action languages serve for describing changes that are caused by performing actions. We define a new action language C, based on the theory of causal explanation proposed recently by McCain and Turner, and illustrate its expressive power by applying it to a number of examples. The mathematical results presented in the paper relate C to the Baral---Gelfond theory of concurrent actions. Introduction Representing properties of actions has been the subject of many papers and two recent books (Sandewall 1995), (Shanahan 1997). One direction of work makes use of "action languages," such as A (Gelfond & Lifschitz 1993) and its dialects. An action language serves for describing the effects of actions on fluents. The meaning of a set of propositions in an action language can be represented by a "transition diagram." In this paper we define a new action language C, based on the theory of causal explanation proposed in (McCain & Turner 1997) and extended in (Lifschitz 1997a). The main i...