Functional completion

Abstract

Nonmonotonic causal logic is a knowledge representation language designed for describing domains that involve actions and change. The process of literal completion, similar to program completion familiar from the theory of logic programming, can be used to translate some nonmonotonic causal theories into classical logic. Its applicability is restricted, however, to theories that deal with truth-valued fluents, represented by predicate symbols. In this note we introduce functional completion—a more general process that can be applied to causal theories in which fluents are treated as functions.