Author Description

Abstract: "This paper is a motivational outline of more formal work that is forthcoming. It addresses the intuitively plausible notion that action specifications and system invariants are related for interesting classes of actions. This relation is investigated for STRIPS- like action specifications in which the conditions are definite for a blocks world. We outline how such conditions can be translated into action invariants. A basic requirement is that the specifications are definite and the world knowledge can be made complete. The key idea in the translation is the use of persistence in reasoning about change. Given invariants, we indicate how the reverse translation into conditions can be made