Reasoning with incomplete information. (English) Zbl 0694.68003

Etherington, David W.

Research Notes in Artificial Intelligence. London: Pitman Publishing; Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publ., Inc. VIII, 240 p. £17.95 (1988).

The book presents an extensive summary of the existing results in the field of nonmonotoic logic. Nonmonotonicity means that adding new information can block inferences possible before. Reiter’s default logic (having rules of the form (A:B)\(| -C\), meaning that C can be derived from A iff contradiction cannot be derived from B) and McCarthy’s circumscription (axiom schemas giving certain minimality conditions on models) and relations between these two approaches are investigated in detail. Relations with other approaches, such as closed world assumption, logic of knowledge and Moore’s autoepistemic logic are described.

Reviewer: T.Tammet

MSC:

68-02	Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to computer science
68T15	Theorem proving (deduction, resolution, etc.) (MSC2010)
03B60	Other nonclassical logic

Keywords:

nonmonotoic logic; default logic; circumscription