How to Execute a Conditional
Richard B. Scherl, Yves Lesp, Hector J. Levesque, Fangzhen Lin, Raymond Reiter · 1996
The execution of a plan containing conditionals by an agent with incomplete knowledge poses some difficult problems. In order for the conditional to be meaningful, the agent must know whether or not the condition is true at execution time. This paper proposes one solution to this problem by integrating sensing actions into GOLOG, a high-level robot programming language. At run time, the interpreter performs a small amount of planning to ensure that the agent will know whether or not a condition is true prior to the point where the test for the truth of the condition needs to be made. Introduction Artificial agents, be they robots or software agents, need to be designed to achieve their goals in a world about which the agents have incomplete knowledge. Our approach to the design of such agents is to develop a high level language, called GOLOG (Levesque et al. 1996; Lesp'erance et al. 1995; 1994), to specify such agents. Programs written in GOLOG can be seen as schematic plans with the...