On the relationships between static and dynamic causal rules in the situation calculus
Fangzhen Lin · 1998
We can distinguish two kinds of causal rules in the situation calculus: the dynamic ones that are normally used to capture the effects of actions, and the static ones that are used to capture causal dependencies among fluents within a single situation. While the former, in the form of effect axioms, come naturally with or even can be said to be the trademark of the situation calculus, the latter are more recent additions. In this paper, we propose a systematic transformation of static causal rules to dynamic ones by using a special natural action, and show some relationships between these two types of causal rules using this transformation. 1 Introduction We consider the problem of specifying the effects of actions in the situation calculus [ 7 ] . In particular, we consider the ramification problem which, in a broad sense, concerns the role of domain constraints in generating the indirect effects of actions. To motivate, Consider the statement "if there is a fire, then there is smok...