The Problem of Existence

Abstract

Reasoning about changes in existence of objects, such as steam appearing and water disappearing when boiling occurs, is something people do every day. Discovering methods to reason about such changes in existence is a central problem in Naive Physics. This paper analyzes the problem by isolating an important case, called quantity-conditioned existence, and presents a general method for solving it. An example generated by an implemented program using the solution is exhibited, and the remaining open problems are discussed.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1985
Accession Number
ADA465765

Entities

People

  • Ken Forbus

Organizations

  • University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign

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  • Ground and Sea Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Artificial Intelligence Computing
  • Chemical Reactions
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computer Science
  • Containers
  • Equations
  • Heat Energy
  • Heat Transmission
  • Inequalities
  • Materials
  • Materials Science
  • Models
  • Ontologies
  • Physics
  • Reasoning

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  • Educational Psychology
  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
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