Commonsense Reasoning with the Multiple World Mechanism

Abstract

Uranus is a programming system designed for knowledge representation. The multiple world mechanism of Uranus makes it possible to represent conceptual space and time sequence. In this paper, we examine commonsense reasoning with this mechanism. By commonsense reasoning, we mean reasoning with rules which have exceptions. The results must fit our intuition. To do so requires ordering among rules. Non-monotonic logic is too weak for this purpose. We show that the multiple world mechanism of Uranus provides the natural ordering among rules, and thus it is suitable for commonsense reasoning.