An Attempt to Formalise a Non-Trivial Benchmark Problem in Common Sense
Reasoning
Murray Shanahan
Abstract
Most logic-based AI research works at a meta-theoretical level, producing
new logics and studying their properties. Little effort is made to show how
these logics can be used to formalise object-level theories of common sense.
In the spirit of Pat Hayes’s Naive Physics Manifesto, the present paper supplies
a formalisation of a non-trivial benchmark problem in common sense physical
reasoning, namely how to crack an egg. The formalisation is based on the
event calculus, a well-known formalism for reasoning about action. Along
the way, a number of methodological issues are raised, such as the question
of how the symbols deployed in the formalisation might be grounded through
a robot’s interaction with the world.