A modular action description language

Abstract

“Toy worlds ” involving actions, such as the blocks world and the Missionaries and Cannibals puzzle, are often used by re-searchers in the areas of commonsense reasoning and plan-ning to illustrate and test their ideas. We would like to cre-ate a database of general-purpose knowledge about actions that encodes common features of many action domains of this kind, in the same way as abstract algebra and topology represent common features of specific number systems. This paper is a report on the first stage of this project—the design of an action description language in which this database will be written. The new language is an extension of the action language C+. Its main distinctive feature is the possibility of referring to other action descriptions in the definition of a new action domain.