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CS323: Common Sense Reasoning in Logic Fall 1999

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Welcome to the CS323 course web page! Information about the class, syllabus, homework, etc. can be found here.

Table of Contents

• General Course Information
• Syllabus
• Readings
• Handouts
• Homework
• Additional Readings
• Related Resources
• Student List

Course:	CS323: Common Sense Reasoning in Logic
Instructor:	Professor John McCarthy Email: jmc@cs.stanford.edu Office: Gates 208 Office Hours: By appointment.
TA:	Aarati Parmar Email: aarati@cs.stanford.edu Office: Gates 218 Office Hours: Thursdays, 2:30pm to 4:30pm, Room 218. (Right after class; we might be in the lounge area outside my office).
Secretary:	Maria Bharwada Email: maria@cs.stanford.edu Office: Gates 205
When:	Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:15pm to 2:30pm
Where:	Gates 498. (New location!)
Email List:	All students should be on cs323@cs.stanford.edu. To get on/off this list, email aarati@cs.stanford.edu. (People who came to the first and second meetings are already on it.)

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Readings

Here is a list of the readings. This is the same information as in the bibliography of the syllabus.

1. Hal95 Joseph Y. Halpern. Reasoning about Knowledge. In D. Gabbay, editor, Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming, Vol.4. Oxford University Press, 1995.
2. Lif87 Vladimir Lifschitz. Formalizing Common Sense Knowledge: an Introduction. Unpublished manuscript, the ps file has only pages 1-7 (among 12), 1987.
3. Lif93 Vladimir Lifschitz. Circumscription. In Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming, Volume 3: Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Uncertain Reasoning. Oxford University Press, 1993.
4. Lif96a Vladimir Lifschitz. First and Second-Order Logic. Unpublished manuscript, 1996.
5. Lif96b Vladimir Lifschitz. Formalizing Common Sense Knowledge and Reasoning: an Example. Unpublished manuscript, 1996.
6. McC59 John McCarthy. Programs with Common Sense. In Mechanisation of Thought Processes, Proceedings of the Symposium of the National Physics Laboratory, pages 77-84, London, U.K., 1959. Her Majesty's Stationery Office. Reprinted in McC90.
7. McC79a John McCarthy. Ascribing mental qualities to machines. In Martin Ringle, editor, Philosophical Perspectives in Artificial Intelligence. Harvester Press, 1979. Reprinted in [McC90].
8. McC79b John McCarthy. First Order Theories of Individual Concepts and Propositions. In Donald Michie, editor, Machine Intelligence, volume 9. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1979. Reprinted in [McC90].
9. McC80 John McCarthy. Circumscription--A Form of Non-Monotonic Reasoning. Artificial Intelligence, 13:27-39, 1980. Reprinted in [McC90].
10. McC86 John McCarthy. Applications of Circumscription to Formalizing Common Sense Knowledge. Artificial Intelligence, 28:89-116, 1986. Reprinted in [McC90].
11. McC90 John McCarthy. Formalizing Common Sense: Papers by John McCarthy. Ablex Publishing Corporation, 355 Chestnut Street, Norwood, NJ 07648, 1990.
12. McC93 John McCarthy. Notes on Formalizing Context. In IJCAI-93, 1993.
13. McC96a John McCarthy. From Here to Human-Level AI. In KR96 Proceedings, 1996. Available as http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/human.html.
14. McC96b John McCarthy. Making Robots Conscious of their Mental States. In Stephen Muggleton, editor, Machine Intelligence 15. Oxford University Press, 1996. to appear in 1999.
15. McC96c John McCarthy. Missionaries and Cannibals: Making it Elaboration Tolerant. In McCarthy's web page, 1996. Available as http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/cs323/missionaries.ps.
16. McC97 John McCarthy. Elaboration Tolerance. In McCarthy's web page, 1997.
17. MH69 John McCarthy and Patrick J. Hayes. Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence. In B. Meltzer and D. Michie, editors, Machine Intelligence 4, pages 463-502. Edinburgh University Press, 1969.
18. Rei80 Raymond Reiter. A Logic for Default Reasoning. Artificial Intelligence, 13 (1-2):81-132, 1980.
19. SS94 Erik Sandewall and Yoav Shoham. Nonmonotonic Temporal Reasoning. In Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming, Volume 4: Epistemic and Temporal Reasoning. Oxford University Press, 1994.

1. What is AI?. John McCarthy, 1997.
2. Concepts of Logical AI. John McCarthy, 1996.

We will play around with theorem provers like Otter, a proof verification system like PVS and a system for reasoning in causal logic like the Causal Calculator. More information to be handed out later.

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Additional Readings

The readings are already listed but here are some other good things to look at.

• Tom Costello, a member of our research group, taught the course last year. The flavor of that course was different, but still good. Check out his outline (with links to some very good summarizations of the material.)
• A really excellent resource are John's Lecture Notes from previous years. (He follows them pretty closely year to year.) Watch out though, they are 103 pages! normal postscript, "2 pages on 1 page version" postscript
• (9/27/99) Here is the Fall 1998 version of CS323: Nonmonotonic Common Sense Reasoning
• (9/27/99) Here is John's webpage of the course from Fall 1997: Formalizing Common Sense - Nonmonotonic Reasoning

• Broad Area Colloquium on AI, Geometry, Graphics, Robotics, and Vision
• Formal Reasoning Group (This is John's Research Group.)
• Virtual Worldwide Seminar on Logical AI
• Knowledge on the Web Seminar (KnOWS)