A Formal Account of Nondeterministic and Failed Actions

Abstract

Nondeterminism is pervasive in all but the simplest action domains: an agent may flip a coin or pick up a different object than intended, or an action may fail and may fail in different ways. In this paper we provide a qualitative theory of nondeter-minism. The account is based on an epistemic ex-tension to the situation calculus that accommodates sensing actions. Our position is that nondetermin-ism is an epistemic phenomenon, and that the world is most usefully regarded as deterministic. Nonde-terminism arises from an agent’s limited awareness and perception. The account offers several advan-tages: an agent has a set of categorical (as opposed to probabilistic) beliefs, yet can deal with equally-likely outcomes (such as in flipping a fair coin) or with outcomes of differing plausibility (such as an action that may on rare occasion fail). 1

Cite

Text

Delgrande and Levesque. "A Formal Account of Nondeterministic and Failed Actions." International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2013.

Markdown

[Delgrande and Levesque. "A Formal Account of Nondeterministic and Failed Actions." International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2013.](https://mlanthology.org/ijcai/2013/delgrande2013ijcai-formal/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{delgrande2013ijcai-formal,
  title     = {{A Formal Account of Nondeterministic and Failed Actions}},
  author    = {Delgrande, James P. and Levesque, Hector J.},
  booktitle = {International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  year      = {2013},
  pages     = {861-868},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/ijcai/2013/delgrande2013ijcai-formal/}
}