On the intended interpretations of actions

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of commonsense reasoning about action by appealing to Occam's razor - we should accept the simplest hypothesis explaining the observed phenomena - to generalise the commonsense law of inertia. In particular, we identify the intended interpretation of an action as the simplest transformation induced by an action on a world to produce a possible successor. We formalise the notion of simplicity of a transformation as its conditional Kolmogorov complexity. Finally we show that the framework can solve simple commonsense reasoning problems and indicate its role as a first step towards capturing commonsense notions of causation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.