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From Knowledge-based Programs to Graded Belief-based Programs, Part I: On-line Reasoning*

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Abstract

Knowledge-based programs (KBPs) are a powerful notion for expressing action policies in which branching conditions refer to implicit knowledge and call for a deliberation task at execution time. However, branching conditions in KBPs cannot refer to possibly erroneous beliefs or to graded belief, such as

“if my belief that φ holds is high then do some action α else perform some sensing action β”.

The purpose of this paper is to build a framework where such programs can be expressed. In this paper we focus on the execution of such a program (a companion paper investigates issues relevant to the off-line evaluation and construction of such programs). We define a simple graded version of doxastic logic KD45 as the basis for the definition of belief-based programs. Then we study the way the agent’s belief state is maintained when executing such programs, which calls for revising belief states by observations (possibly unreliable or imprecise) and progressing belief states by physical actions (which may have normal as well as exceptional effects).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier, 31062, Toulouse Cedex, France

    Noël Laverny & Jérôme Lang

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  1. Noël Laverny
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  2. Jérôme Lang
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Correspondence to Noël Laverny.

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* A premliminary and shorter version of this paper in the Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-04), pp. 368–372 (Laverny and Lang 2004).

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Laverny, N., Lang, J. From Knowledge-based Programs to Graded Belief-based Programs, Part I: On-line Reasoning* . Synthese 147, 277–321 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-005-1350-1

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