Blocks world

Blocks world

Blocks world refers to a problem or domain in the field of intelligent planning where a set of blocks are placed on a flat surface and the goal is to manipulate them in a specific way. It involves defining actions or operations that can be performed on the blocks, such as picking them up, moving them, or stacking them, and specifying the conditions that must be met for these actions to be valid. The blocks world problem is often used as a benchmark for testing the effectiveness of planning algorithms and artificial intelligence systems.From: Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing [2018], MEvo: a framework for effective macro sets evolution [2020]

First-order logic

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Published in Richard E. Neapolitan, Xia Jiang, Artificial Intelligence, 2018

Richard E. Neapolitan, Xia Jiang

The blocks world suffers from the frame problem, which concerns expressing using logic those aspects of the world that remain unchanged by an action that changes the world for the next time slot. The term fluent refers to an aspect of the world that changes over time, and the term atemporal refers to aspects that do not change. For example, suppose we perform unstack(a,b) for the world in Figure 3.1. Then the logical statement pertaining to this operation entails that the robot is grasping a and that there is nothing on b. However, it does not say anything about c, d, and e. They could be in the configuration shown in Figure 3.1 (the one we expect), but they could also be in any other configuration.

Survey on frontiers of language and robotics

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Published in Advanced Robotics, 2019

T. Taniguchi, D. Mochihashi, T. Nagai, S. Uchida, N. Inoue, I. Kobayashi, T. Nakamura, Y. Hagiwara, N. Iwahashi, T. Inamura

In terms of AI research, several studies have been conducted on pragmatics. SHRDLU was primarily a language parser that allowed user interaction with a robot in a simulated physical world. The user instructed SHRDLU to move various objects around in the ‘blocks world’ containing various basic objects. This program was very innovative and promising, and made many important suggestions not just for the development of artificial conversational systems, but also for the human cognition of language use in the physical world. This scheme still has a great influence on conversational systems. However, Winograd [187] himself pointed to the limits of the SHRDLU scheme in terms of background and subjectivity as follows:

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First-order logic

Survey on frontiers of language and robotics