Non-Monotonic Reasoning in Temporal Domains: The Knowledge Independence Problem

Scott D. Goodwin, Randy Goebel

Abstract: Much interest has been focused on nonmonotonic reasoning in temporal domains since Hanks and McDermott discovered that intuitive temporal representations give rise to the multiple extension problem. Here we consider nonmonotonic reasoning in temporal domains from the perspective of the Theorist hypothetical reasoning framework. We show how this framework can be applied to temporal reasoning in a simple and intuitive way to solve many of the problems posed in the recent literature, such as the Yale Shooting problem, Kautz's Vanishing Car problem, Haugh's Assassin problem, and Haugh's Robot problem.