Formal Real-Time Imagination

  • Authors:

  • Madhura Nirkhe;Sarit Kraus

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA madhura@cs.umd.edu;Department of Mathematic and Computer Science, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900 Israel sarit@bimacs.cs.bui.ac.il

  • Venue:
  • Fundamenta Informaticae
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

Formal real-time imagination is a term that may curiously describe the activities of a commonsense agent in a real-time setting in general, and in a tight deadline situation in particular. We briefly describe an ‘active-logic’ mechanism that fits this description. Temporal projection is an essential component of realtime planning. We draw a parallel between imagination as we understand it in human context and the capacity of the automated agent to formulate mental images of possible scenarios and plans of action in the course of its reasoning. We outline a treatment of temporal issues of significance to a time-situated reasoning mechanism in a dynamic setting with deadlines. The Yale shooting problem is a benchmark problem in temporal reasoning. We demonstrate how the active-logic planning mechanism successfully handles some interesting real-time variants of the Yale shooting problem. The solutions to each of these illustrate the agent’s ability to form contexts within which to reason, to project in each context thus formed by applying default inferences, and to revise and extend its conclusions within each context by applying time-sensitive inference rules, and most importantly, to account for all the time spent in the process.