Automatic Temporal Reasoning
In the noted film classic 2001:A Space Odyssey, the computer HAL can automatically reason about causes and consequences of actions. Based on our research paper on temporal reasoning, we develop an itelligent program that has similar capacity of automatically reasoning about events with time-interval information. Given a problem instance, the program can conduct automatic reasoning to either (i) determine there is no event sequence that would bring the system to a state achieving the goal or (ii) provide an event sequence, the time the events occur, and what causal rules associated with these events are applied such that the system would end in a state achieving the goal.
- See this sample problem instance for temporal reasoning involving four events, eight causal rules, and eight state variables. See a snapshot of information processing done by the system to automatically generate this solution.
- Read the paper, and play with the Windows executable and the sample problem instance in this zip file to see how it can reason about the events and the possible consequences.
- Or play with the windows executable in executable that simulates the dynamics and uncertainty in the dynmical system modelled by the sample problem instance.
Biola University Computer Science Department
