Symbolic and presymbolic logic


Jon Barwise

Abstract

Real world embedded systems have to reason with information in a variety of forms. In recent years, a number of researchers have developed so-called "hybrid systems" for reasoning with such information. Many of these systems are rather ad hoc, responding to the needs of some artificial system like a robot. In this talk I will sketch a principled approach to hybrid reasoning and illustrate it with a system implemented in Mathematica. The system grew out of ideas in my 1997 book with Jerry Seligman, "Information Flow: The logic of distributed systems."