Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Intelligence, as exhibited by people anyway, is surely one of the most complex and mysterious phenomena that we are aware of. One striking aspect of intelligent behavior is that it is clearly conditioned by knowledge: for a very wide range of activities, we make decisions about what to do based on what we know (or believe) about the world, effortlessly and unconsciously. Using what we know in this way is so commonplace that we only really pay attention to it when it is not there. When we say that someone has behaved unintelligently, like when someone has used a lit match to see if there is any gas in a car’s gas tank, what we usually mean is not that there is something that the person did not know, but rather that the person ...