Representing Change for Common-Sense Physical Reasoning

Abstract

Change pervades every moment of our lives. Much of our success in dealing with a constantly changing world is based in common-sense physical reasoning about processes and physical systems. Processes are the way quantities interact over time. Physical systems can be described as a set of quantities and the processes that operate on them. Representations for causality, time, and quantity are needed to fully characterize change in this domain. Several ideas for these representations are examined and synthesized in this paper towards the goal of constructing a framework to support understanding of, reasoning about, and learning how things work.