---
title: "A Simple Formalization of Actions Using Circumscription"
authors:
  - "G. Neelakantan Kartha"
  - "Vladimir Lifschitz"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1995/253"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1995/0253.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1995
pages: "1970-1976"
track: "Temporal Reasoning"
keywords:
---

# A Simple Formalization of Actions Using Circumscription

G. Neelakantan Kartha, Vladimir Lifschitz

*Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1970-1976.

## Abstract

We present a simple circumscriptive method for formalizing actions with indirect effects (ramifications), and show that, in several examples , all second-order quantifiers can be eliminated from these formalizations using existing techniques for computing circumscriptions . One of the two symbolic computation methods employed here is a generalization of predicate completion and the other is based on the SCAN algorithm . The simplicity of our new approach to representing actions is due to th e use of the formalism of nested abnormality theories.