Formal theories of action (preliminary report)
Vladimir Lifschitz · International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 1987
We apply circumscription to formalizing reasoning about the effects of actions in the framework of the situation calculus. The axiomatic description of causal connections between actions and changes allows us to solve the qualification problem and the frame problem using only simple forms of circumscription. The method is applied to the Hanks--McDermott shooting problem and to a blocks world in which blocks can be moved and painted.