From Causal Theories to Logic Programs (Sometimes)

Abstract

In this paper, we shall provide a translation of a class of causal theories in (Lin [3]) to Gelfond and Lifschitz’s disjunctive logic programs with classical negation [1]. We found this translation interesting for at least the following two reasons: it provides a basis on which a wide class of causal theories in ([3]) can be computed; and it sheds some new lights on the nature of the causal theories in [3]. Our translation is in many ways similar to the one given in [9,2]. Our main result is a theorem that shows how action precondition and fully instantiated successor state axioms can be computed from the answer sets of the translated logic program.