Actions, Situations, and Events

Reasoning about results of actions is central to a

knowledge-based agent. The problem with
propositional logic is the need to have different copies
of the action description for each time the action
might be executed. this section uses first-order logic
to avoid that problem
one way to avoid multiple copies of axioms is to
simply quantify over time, to say:
"for all time t, such-and-such is the result at time t+1
of doing action at time t"
 Actions, Situations, and Events
The Situation Calculus
Situations - are logical terms consisting of the initial situation (S 0)
and all situations that are generated by applying an action to a
situation. 
the function Result(a,s) gives the resulting situation when action a is
applied to situation s

• The robot is in the kitchen.

– in(robot,kitchen)
• It walks into the living room.
– in(robot,livingRoom)
• Oops…
• in(robot,kitchen,2:02pm)
• in(robot,livingRoom,2:17pm)
• But what if you are not sure when it was?
• We can do something simpler than rely on time stamps…
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 Situation Calculus Ontology
• Actions: terms, such as “forward” and
“turn(right))”
• Situations: terms; initial situation s0 and all
situations that are generating by applying an
action to a situation. result(a,s) names the
situation resulting when action a is done in
situation s.

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Situation Calculus Ontology continued
• Fluents: functions and predicates that vary from one
situation to the next. By convention, the situation is
the last argument of the fluent.
~holding(robot,gold,s0)
• Atemporal or eternal predicates and functions do not
change from situation to situation.
gold(g1).
lastName(wumpus,smith).
adjacent(livingRoom,kitchen).

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Mental Events and Mental Objects

The objects relates to Believes, Knows, Wants, Intends, and

Informs is termed as mental objects while an action upon
mental object is termed as mental events

•Beliefs can deduce new beliefs. Yet none of them has any
knowledge about beliefs or about deduction.

•Knowledge about one’s own knowledge and reasoning

processes is useful for controlling inference
To understand the difference between belief and knowledge we need to
understand how each is defined. Beliefs, are those things that we
personally understand to be true but may not actually be True. As such,
our opinions, personal testimony, and anecdotal (a short interesting
story about a real person or event, possibly not true) evidence all fall
within this category. Belief is not a choice. Belief is an involuntary action
occurring after our own internal standard for evidence has been met. In
other words, belief is the necessary result of being convinced. It is
important to recognize that our own internal standard of evidence is not
equivalent to scientific (actual) evidence. Lastly, knowledge is a subset
of belief.

Beliefs
•Believes(x, P(a)) x believes that P(a) is true.
Knowledge is defined as the small fraction of our beliefs that actually
meet the scientific standard of evidence. As such, knowledge represents
the small fraction of our beliefs that are actually True. Therefore
knowledge is by definition “True belief(s)”.
As mentioned previously, knowledge is a subset of Truth. The absolute
Truth doesn’t change whether we have knowledge of it or not.
Alternatively, our own awareness of the Truth can change as we obtain
more knowledge. Because of this, the apparent Truth (our knowledge)
can change with time.