Posts

Showing posts from June, 2014

Relating Event Calculus and Linear Logic, Part 2

Before I begin the technical content of this post, just a quick update: I gave my talk on "Generative Story Worlds as Linear Logic Programs" at INT in Milwaukee on the 17-18th, and I kept a travelogue, which includes notes from all the talks! The travelogue also details my time at AdaCamp, an "unconference" event on feminism & open technology, which I would strongly recommend to any women interested in those topics. I had a great time meeting people at both of these events! -- Where I  last left off  in my discussion of the event calculus, I was discussing the idea of "encoding" vs. "embedding." In some discussions, these terms map onto the alternate terms "deep embedding" and "shallow embedding." If I understand them correctly, Alexiev's program gives a deep embedding of the event calculus: the core constructs of the calculus, fluents and events, are modeled as terms in the underlying logic program. I was

Relating Event Calculus and Linear Logic

My research uses linear logic to describe actions , i.e. to write rules to answer the question "what happens if..." rather than "what holds if...". The desire to reason about actions follows a long line of endeavors to create AI with logic, where back then AI seemed to mean "computational agents that can take initiative, have goals, reason about their environments, and act upon them." AI-inspired logicians have been reasoning about actions for a long time, and one fruitful tool for doing so is the Event Calculus ( Kowalski and Sergot 1986 ). In this post, I'm going to describe my understanding of the relationship between Event Calculus and linear logic, by way of some Celf code I wrote last week after reading Vladimir Alexiev's " Event Calculus as a Linear Logic Program ." Primarily, this is a post about that particular paper and the tinkering I did around it, but I'll also explain some of the context I've picked up on the way.