Professor John McCarthy
Father of AI

Articles

Elaborating MCP (Part I)

Notes on the potential for using the Missionaries and Cannibals puzzle as a Drosophila for research in elaboration tolerance.

The Missionaries and Cannibals puzzle presents several problems in the logical expression of common sense reasoning. These include generality of axiomatization of common sense facts, nonmonotonic reasoning, Gricean implicatures and elaboration tolerance. We concentrate on the last of these.

We chose this Drosophila for research in elaboration tolerance rather than a practical problem for the same reason Drosophilas are chosen for many genetic experiments rather than pigs.

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