🚀 go-pugleaf

           Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
              (GB = Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street)

       -------------------------------------------------------------

                                    AI
                   GB221, at 11:00 a.m., 3 December 1992

                                Ray Reiter
  University of Toronto and The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

             " HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THE SITUATION CALCULUS "

The situation calculus has had a bad press in AI circles, and no press at
all in the computer science community at large. This talk attempts to set
the record straight. I shall argue that, contrary to the prevailing view in
AI, the situation calculus is an extremely valuable formalism for
representing and reasoning about change, provided a suitable solution to
the frame problem has been found. Towards that end, I shall first describe
an approach to the frame problem suitable for primitive, determinate
events.  On the basis of these ideas, I shall then describe three
applications:

1. Specifying database evolution.

2. Procedure specifications in software engineering (joint work with Alex
   Borgida and John Mylopoulos).

3. A theory of complex events, defined in terms of primitive,
   determinate events. This provides the basis of a novel programming
   language for discrete event simulation and the control of high-level
   robot actions (joint work with Hector Levesque and Fangzhen Lin).