Situations, Actions, and Causal Laws

By John McCarthy. 1963

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Causal Inference & Discovery

Citations in the corpus

STAR: A Benchmark for Situated Reasoning in Real-World Videos (2024, methodology): “They formulate situations as a set of formulae and perform calculus based on the designed logic rules [31, 36].”
SOME PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS FROM THE STANDPOINT OF ARTI CIAL INTELLIGENCE (1987, methodology): “The formalism of this paper represents an advance over McCarthy (1963) and Green (1969) in that it permits proof of the correctness of strategies that contain loops and strategies that involve the acquisition of knowledge, and it is also somewhat more concise.”
Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model (2023, background): “Planning, a central ability in intelligent agents, involves generating a series of actions to achieve a specific goal [40, 7].”
Acquiring Recursive and Iterative Concepts with Explanation-Based Learning (1990, methodology): “The situation calculus (McCarthy, 1963) is used in this section’s example to reason about actions, in the style of Green (1969).”
Logical models of argument (2000, methodology): “His model is based on situation calculus [McCarthy 1963; Levesque et al. 1998].”
Software Abstractions - Logic, Language, and Analysis (2006, methodology): “The approach was pioneered by John McCarthy in his situation calculus [51].”
Practical solution techniques for first-order MDPs (2009, background): “1 Basic Ingredients The situation calculus is a first-order language for axiomat izing dynamic worlds (McCarthy, 1963).”
The Situation Calculus: A Case for Modal Logic (2010, background): “What we have seen so far is no more than a variant of McCarthy’s original proposal from fifty years ago.”