A Simple Formalization of Actions Using Circumscription
We present a simple circumscriptive method for formalizing actions with indirect effects (ramifications), and show that, in several examples, all second-order quantifiers can be eliminated from these formalizations using existing techniques for computing circumscriptions. One of the two symbolic computation methods employed here is a generalization of predicate completion and the other is based on the SCAN algorithm. The simplicity of our new approach to representing actions is due to the use of the formalism of nested abnormality theories.