An Epistemic Approach to Nondeterminism: Believing in the Simplest Course of Events

This paper describes an approach for reasoning in a dynamic domain with nondeterministic actions in which an agent’s (categorical) beliefs correspond to the simplest, or most plausible, course of events consistent with the agent’s observations and beliefs. The account is based on an epistemic extension of the situation calculus, a first-order theory of reasoning about action that accommodates sensing actions. In particular, the account is based on a qualitative theory of nondeterminism. Our position is that for commonsense reasoning, the world is most usefully regarded as deterministic, and that nondeterminism is an epistemic phenomenon, arising from an agent’s limited awareness and perception. The account offers several advantages: an agent has a set of categorical (as opposed to probabilistic) beliefs, yet can deal with equally-likely outcomes (such as in flipping a fair coin) or with outcomes of differing plausibility (such as an action that on rare occasions may fail). The agent maintains as its set of contingent beliefs the most plausible, or simplest, picture of the world, consistent with its beliefs and actions it believes it executed; yet it may modify these in light of later information.