21

The Situation Calculus

21.1 Reasoning about States and Actions

In Chapter 7, I introduced the notion of state spaces and how they could be searched to compute plans of actions to achieve goals. There, I talked about searching either iconic- or feature-based state spaces. Now, with richer languages to describe features and the constraints among them, we can investigate feature-based planning methods much more thoroughly.

The fact that we can leave out properties of world states that are irrelevant to the problem at hand or that are not known is one of the powerful aspects of using a feature-based approach. This aspect is particularly important in describing the goal condition that we want the agent to achieve by its actions. Starting from the ...

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