SYMBOLIC REASONING UNDER UNCERTAINTY

Prepared By:
Prof. Sushma Prajapati
Assistant Professor
CKPCET
Surat
Email : [email protected]
•

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OUTLINE

• Introduction To Non-monotonic Reasoning

• Logics For Non-monotonic Reasoning

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MONOTONIC LOGIC
• Standard logic is monotonic:
• once you prove something is true, it is true
forever
• Monotonic Logic is not a good fit to reality
• If the wallet is in the purse, and the purse in is the
car, we can conclude that the wallet is in the car
• But what if we take the purse out of the car?

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WHY NON MONOTONIC REASONING?
• The ABC murder story (from The Web of Belief, Quine and
Ullian, 1978)

• Let Alec, Bob and Cezar be suspects in a murder case (they

all benefit from the murder).
• Alecu has an alibi, in a register of a respectable hotel in
Arizona.
• Bob also has an alibi, for his brother-in-law testified that Bob
was visiting him in New york at the time.
• Cezar pleads alibi too, claiming to have been watching a ski
meet in California, but we have only his word for that.

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WHY NON MONOTONIC REASONING?
• So we believe:
(1) That Alec has not commit the crime
(2) That Bob did not
(3) That Alec or Bob or Cezar did

• But presently Cezar documents his alibi – he had the good

luck to have been caught by television in the sidelines at the
ski meet. A new belief is thus thrust upon us:
(4) That Cezar did not

(1), (2), (3), (4) are inconsistent, we have to reject a belief

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MONOTONIC LOGIC
• Given a collection of facts D that entail some
sentence s (s is a logical conclusion of D):
• for any collection of facts D’ such that D⊆ D’ , D’
also entails s.
• in other words: s is also a logical conclusion of
any superset of D.

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NONMONOTONIC LOGIC
• In a nonmonotonic system:
• the addition of new facts can reduce the set
of logical conclusions.
• S is a conclusion of D, but is not
necessarily a conclusion of D+newfact.
• Humans use nonmonotonic reasoning
constantly!

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 WHAT IS “NON-MONOTONIC LOGIC” ?
• To understand what nonmonotonic logic means simple
consider a standard example:
"all birds fly",
"Tweety is a bird",
"Does Tweet fly?".
• The obvious answer is yes,
• however what if later you learned that Tweety had a broken wing,
then the answer becomes no,
• then what if you learned that tweet was an airplane pilot, or had a
jet pack, the answer can change again.

• The important point is that as new information is added

the answers change

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NONMONOTONIC LOGIC

• Facts and rules can be changed at any time

• such facts and rules are said to be dynamic
• Prolog uses nonmonotonic logic
• assert(...) adds a fact or rule
• retract(...) removes a fact or rule
• assert and retract are said to be extralogical
predicates

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INTELLIGENT REASONING
• One of the characteristics associated with
intelligent systems is adaptability - the ability to
deal with a changing environment.
• Adaptation requires that a system be capable of
adding and retracting beliefs as new
information is available.
• This requires nonmonotonic reasoning.

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UNCERTAINTY
• Another characteristic of intelligent systems is the
ability to reason under conditions of
uncertainty.
• Another way of saying this: the ability to
reason with an incomplete set of facts.

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CAN WE IMPLEMENT INHERITANCE USING PREDICATE LOGIC?

• Pat is a Bat.
• Bats are Mammals.
• Bats can fly.
• Bats have 2 legs.
• Mammals cannot fly.
• Mammals have 4 legs.
• How many legs does Pat have?

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INHERITANCE
• Reasoning about inheritance of properties from
one class to another:
Bird(x) ⇒ Flies(x)
• Clearly this is not a good rule, since we know
there are exceptions.
Bird(x) ∧ Normal(x) ⇒ Flies(x)
• This provides for exceptions, although we must
define the conditions that imply Normal(x).

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NORMAL(X)

• Assuming we know that:

Ostrich(x) ⇒ Bird(x) ∧ ~Flies(x)
• we can derive:
Ostrich(x) ⇒ ~Normal(x)
• So an ostrich is not a normal bird.
• But what about all the the other things that are
birds?

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ASSUMPTIONS AND DEFAULTS

• If there is no reason to believe otherwise, assume

that Normal(x) is TRUE.
• The default is that everything is normal.
• Now we only need to supply additional information
for exceptions.

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HOW TO SPECIFY DEFAULTS
• A number of formal systems have been developed to
handle defaults.
• Nonmonotonic logics formalize unsound but
reasonable patterns of reasoning with uncertain,
incomplete and inconsistent information
• Default Logic: New rule of inference
• Abduction: New interpretation of implication.

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 AND MORE LOGICS TO THINK ABOUT!
• Modal logic is useful for modeling reasoning about
knowledge, actions, time or obligations.
• Epistemic logics apply the techniques of modal logic to
reasoning about knowledge.
• Both individual and group knowledge is studied. The study of
epistemic logic is relevant to communication protocols and
cooperation.
• Deontic logic formalizes normative modalities.
• Deontic logic can be applied to representation of
normative (e.g. legal) knowledge.

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DEFAULT REASONING WITH NONMONOTONIC LOGIC

• Predicate logic with an extension:

• a modal operator M which means is “consistent
with everything we know”.
• Example:
∀x,y: Related(x,y) ∧ M GetAlong(x,y) ⇒ WillDefend (x,y)

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 DEFAULT LOGIC
• New rule of inference: A:B
C
• If A is true and it is consistent to assume B, then C is true.
• Same idea, but now used as a rule of inference. The
new rule extends the knowledge base to a set of
plausible extensions, any new statement that is true in
all extensions is added.

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INHERITANCE WITH DEFAULT LOGIC
• Support for inheritance using Default Logic:
Mammal(x) : Legs(x,4)
Legs(x,4)
• In the absence of contradictory information,
we can assume anything that is a mammal has 4
legs. (also need a rule stating that nothing can
have 2 different numbers of legs!)

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INHERITANCE DIAGRAMS
• The book shows how we can also express default reasoning using
diagrams.

Flying Things
Normal Facts

Default Ostriches Birds

¬Default

Fred Tweety
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A PROBLEM WITH NML

• ∀x: Republican(x) ∧ M ~ Pacifist(x) ⇒ ~

Pacifist(x)
• ∀ x: Quaker(x) ∧ M Pacifist(x) ⇒ Pacifist(x)
• Republican(Dick)
• Quaker(Dick)

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NOT QUITE THIS EASY

• Assuming we have some mechanism for

representing defaults, there can still be problems:

Pacifists
• Is Nixon a pacifist?

Republicans Quakers

Nixon

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NIXON DILEMMA

• In general we must be prepared to deal with

multiple, possibly conflicting consequences of a set
of facts.
• One simple idea - rank all the assumptions and
use rank to determine which to believe.

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OTHER APPROACHES TO HANDLING CONFLICTING ASSUMPTIONS.

• Minimalist Reasoning
• Assume that there are fewer true statements that false
statements in the world.
• Find the smallest interpretation that satisfies all the
statements we know to be true.
• Closed World Assumption: the only objects that
satisfy a predicate are those that must.
• forces positive assertions to take priority over negative
assertions

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CLOSED WORLD ASSUMPTION
• If we are told nothing about Tweety, other than Tweety is a
bird,
• we assume that Tweety's feet are not in concrete, or
Tweety's wings are not broken, this is the closed world
assumption.
• Humans regularly make assumptions and when new evidence
appears those assumptions can be changed, causing a different
answer, thus behaving nonmonotonicaly.

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NONMONOTONIC VS. CLASSICAL LOGIC
• Nonmonotonic logic does not have many
essential properties of classical first order logic,
specifically semi-decidability.
▪ In classical logic, it is possible for a system
to halt (be stuck in an infinite loop) trying to
prove the negation of something for which
there is insufficient information.
▪ In nonmonotonic default logic, rather than
return with no answer, the process returns
with a wrong (default answer).

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SUMMARY - NONMONOTONIC VS. CLASSICAL LOGIC
• First order logic although descriptively universal, is
not effective at handling large classes of problems.
▪ If computers are going to handle common sense we
need to be able to have some form of default
reasoning.
• Nonmonotonic logic can be used in many domains
where classical logic falls short:
▪ such as in the areas of default diagnosis, diagnosis,
action, and temporal logic.

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