Readings in Qualitative Reasoning About Physical Systems

Book excerpt: Readings in Qualitative Reasoning about Physical Systems describes the automated reasoning about the physical world using qualitative representations. This text is divided into nine chapters, each focusing on some aspect of qualitative physics. The first chapter deal with qualitative physics, which is concerned with representing and reasoning about the physical world. The goal of qualitative physics is to capture both the commonsense knowledge of the person on the street and the tacit knowledge underlying the quantitative knowledge used by engineers and scientists. The succeeding chapter discusses the qualitative calculus and its role in constructing an envisionment that includes behavior over both mythical time and elapsed time. These topics are followed by reviews of the mathematical aspects of qualitative reasoning, history-based simulation and temporal reasoning, as well as the intelligence in scientific computing. The final chapters are devoted to automated modeling for qualitative reasoning and causal explanations of behavior. These chapters also examine the qualitative kinematics of reasoning about shape and space. This book will prove useful to psychologists and psychiatrists.