chapter 12

Temporal Constraint Networks

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

Mark Twain

Philosophers, psychologists, and linguists have struggled for many years with the difficulties inherent in representing time. Representing and reasoning about time also play an important role in artificial intelligence. Almost any area within AI—commonsense reasoning, natural language cognition, plan recognition, scheduling, planning, and qualitative reasoning, to name but a few—involves some sort of reasoning about time.

A temporal reasoning system should consist of a temporal knowledge base, a routine to check its consistency, a query-answering mechanism, and an inference mechanism capable of discovering new information. ...

Get Constraint Processing now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.