First Order Predicate Calculus

Good Advice

If your thesis is utterly vacuous
Use first-order predicate calculus.
With sufficient formality
The sheerest banality
Will be hailed by the critics: "Miraculous!"
        -- Henry Kautz

Why FOPC (FOL)?

PC is weak: can't express "All classes are boring", "Some people like some cats", "If anyone moves, you all die."

FOL is not all-powerful by any means:

FOPC (FOL) Facts

FOL has variables, universal and existential quantification (infinite AND and OR), predicates that assert properties of things, and functions that map between things.

FOL has practical advantages, especially for automation. At least one sound and complete rule of inference (resolution), a semi-decidable inference procedure.

FOL can be written in non-clausal or clausal syntax. The former is more "human-friendly", with (more or less) intuitive operators. Latter is better for computers; harder for humans to see semantics of a sentence (recall a clause is just a disjunction of literals):
A imples B, A → B vs. ( ∼ A ∨ B)

Thus non-clausal proof techniques (with several inference rules), clausal-techniques (one rule, calls for putting sentences into CNF).

"Theorem proving" can be used, as in prolog, for question-answering, but also for planning (generating a sequence of actions for a robot, say).

"Close" to being powerful enough for actual practical use, has been extended as we've seen with times, quantities, math, modal operators...

Individuals, Terms, Predicates, Functions

In a domain including people with some named individuals we might have FOL:
Person(Mary), Loves(Romeo, Juliet), Hates(father(Romeo),father(Juliet))
Where
the term Mary is a named domain element
the predicate Person is unary
the predicate Loves is binary
the function father is unary, evaluates to a person's father.

The symbols used (Juliet, father) need to be given an interpretation (what's a function, a predicate, etc.), and individuals must be mapped onto domain elements before truth value can be assigned to a sentence.

Symbols are just that, arbitrary names whose semantics is determined only by the interpretation: Hates(father(Romeo),father(Juliet)) could be expressing that √ (36) > √(100), thus evaluating to FALSE.

FOL Formulae

Complex expressions are formed using the connectives ∧ , ∨, ⇒, ⇔ as in propositional logic, along with quantifiers ∃, ∀ . Term: a constant or variable (coming up!), or function applied to an appropriate number of terms.

Ground Term: a term with no variables.
E.g. Plus(2,3), MotherOf(FatherOf(Fred)).

Atomic formula (atom, atomic well-formed-formula (WFF)) : A predicate applied to an appropriate number of terms.
E.g. 2 * 7 = 14. Person(Mary), Hates(FatherOf(Juliet), Romeo).

Degree of abstraction can vary depending on the ambitions of the formulator! E.g...

Eat(Joe, Cookie) , (past, present, future..?)
Eat (Joe, Cookie1> , Eat-event3) ∧ Cookie(Cookie1) ⇒
      Inside(Cookie1, Joe, Result-state(Eat-event3))

This last is like the Situational Calculus, a way of keeping track of time and causation by identifying events and formalizing their relations. It leads to the Frame Problem: we also have to keep track of everything that does NOT change (!!) when some action is taken.

FOL Syntax

FOL Semantics

Goal: determine if a formula is TRUE or FALSE. For this, need an interpretation to specify:

Quantification and Variables

Express properties of entire collections of individuals without referencing each by name. We use a variable to stand for all the individuals.

The variable is bound by the quantifier. This introduces the familiar idea of scoping in a logic context, usually disambiguated by parentheses ().

Quantifiers may be iterated and nested.

Usually variables are late letters (...,x,y,z).

Examples

∀ x(Dog(x)) ⇒ ∃ y[Person(y) ∧ Owns(y,x)]
-- Every dog is owned by someone.
∃ x ∃ y ∃ e. Eat(x,y,e) ∧ Dog(x) ∧ Cookie(y) ∧ Eat-event(e)
-- A dog eats (ate, will eat) a cookie.
∃ x. Dog(x) ∧ Owns (John, x) -- John has a dog.

∀, ∃ related: No whale is a fish.
∀ x. Whale(x) ⇒ ∼ Fish(x)
∀ x. Fish(x) ⇒ ∼ Whale(x)
∀ x. ∼ (Whale(x) ∧ Fish(x))
∀ x. ∼ Whale(x) ∨ ∼ Fish(x)
∼ ∃ x. Whale(x) ∧ Fish(x)

∀ , ∃, More Examples

Ambiguity in English

Totally pervasive!

"Everyone loves somebody":

Either
∀ x. ∃ y. Loves(x,y)
Everyone, say x, loves at least one other person y, but who y is depends on who x is.
or
∃ y. ∀ x. Loves(x,y)
There exists a single person y who is loved universally by all other people x.

Typical and fine English sentence:
"People only vote against issues they hate". (Really? that's ALL people do?).

More Examples

Models for FOL

Problem: combinatorics. E.g. just with p k-ary predicates and n constants, there are p nk instantiations.

Inference in First-Order Logic

Simple Example

Simple Modus Ponens, Universal Instantiation

Universal Instantiation brings in idea ofthe substitution of an individual for a variable. Along with two-way matching (unification), basic to automated proof. We'll be back to this!

Soon we'll see Existential Instantiation: if we know
∃ x. P(x), for example, we know there is at least one individual A such that P(A). If we know who it is, well enough, but even if not we are entitled to imagine the individual and call him anything we want, like Fred, P, Skolem-constant, whatever. We simply invent a name for the individual for later use. We'll use this rule of inference, Skolemization later, also in the context of automated proofs.

Generalized Modus Ponens, Forward Chaining

Generalized Modus Ponens, Backward Chaining

Non-clausal FOL Inference

We've only seen examples using non-clausal syntax and (generalized) Modus Ponens, but there are LOTS of valid inference rules! Contrapositive, for instance, exchanging ∀ , ∃, ∼ .... etc! So if we want to automate:

Next Big Topic

Inference with Resolution.