
The Event Calculus Explained (1999) [pdf] - adamnemecek
https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mpsha/ECExplained.pdf
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dominotw
Can someone summarize this article and shed some light on how this can be
useful.

I tried reading it but I had a hard time just parsing sentences.

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ced
It's part of "good old fashioned AI". It allows a program to reason logically
about the world and create a plan that will get you from your initial state
(eg. "I'm hungry") to some desired end state ("Not hungry"). I don't know if
it's actually used in industry much, because the generality of logical
reasoning makes it slow, and specialized algorithms often perform better.

As far as AI research goes, its main problem is that it can't handle
uncertainty, which is why it's not all that popular anymore.

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cscurmudgeon
There is quite a bit of work on representing uncertainty in the Event
Calculus.

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ced
Oh, I'm sure there is, but it's hard to do without also losing the nice
properties of the purely logical formulation, and AFAIK that's the main reason
why these approaches are not more popular.

If you have a link to an interesting take on it, please share!

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scaramanga
If you're interested in this then you should check out the fluent calculus
which solves many of the problems of event/situation/etc calculus. In
particular it has a much more elegant solution for the frame problem by
distinguishing states from situations. But it also has many interesting and
useful extensions

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nl
I think any modern discussion of event calculus needs to mention causal
calculus: [http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if-correlation-doesnt-
impl...](http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if-correlation-doesnt-imply-
causation-then-what-does/)

This lets you calculate (sometimes) that correlation does imply causation(!)

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nl
Downvotes? Judea Pearl won a Turing award for this, and I get downvotes! ;)

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jibbit
I'm really very interested in this, but it is beyond my ability and feels out
of reach. I'm not looking for a shortcut, but where would a self taught
programmer start if this field interested her?

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orasis
This feels very heavy and not as useful as other models such as Markov
Decision Processes. Can someone enlighten me where this would be more
convenient to reason with than an MDP?

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cscurmudgeon
It is sort of orthogonal to an MDP.

MDPs can be represented in the event calculus.

A programming language analogy: An MDP can be thought of as a class of
programs that satisfy certain conditions. They can be written in any language.
Event Calculus happens to be a Turing complete programming language.

(Note: First-order logic, which Event Calculus is based upon, can simulate a
universal Turing machine.)

