Physical Reasoning in an Open World

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-world reasoner for physical scenarios, enabling valid inferences from incomplete information in a toy microworld involving containers and their states.

Contribution

It presents the first implementation of an open-world physical reasoner in Prolog for a toy microworld, contrasting with traditional closed-world approaches.

Findings

Successfully reasoned with incomplete information about container states

Demonstrated the feasibility of open-world reasoning in physical scenarios

Provides a foundation for more complex open-world physical reasoning systems

Abstract

Most work on physical reasoning, both in artificial intelligence and in cognitive science, has focused on closed-world reasoning, in which it is assumed that the problem specification specifies all relevant objects and substance, all their relations in an initial situation, and all exogenous events. However, in many situations, it is important to do open-world reasoning; that is, making valid conclusions from very incomplete information. We have implemented in Prolog an open-world reasoner for a toy microworld of containers that can be loaded, unloaded, sealed, unsealed, carried, and dumped.