Logic for Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology

Book excerpt: Logic for Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology is based on student notes used to teach logic to second year undergraduates and Artificial Intelligence to graduate students at the University of London since1984, first at Imperial College and later at King's College. Logic has been applied to a wide variety of subjects such as theoretical computer science, software engineering, hardware design, logic programming, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. In this way it has served to stimulate the research for clear conceptual foundations. Over the past 20 years many extensions of classical logic such as temporal, modal, relevance, fuzzy, probabilistic and non-monotoinic logics have been widely used in computer science and artificial intelligence, therefore requiring new formulations of classical logic, which can be modified to yield the effect of the new applied logics. The text introduces classical logic in a goal directed way which can easily deviate into discussing other applied logics. It defines the many types of logics and differences between them. Dov Gabbay, FRSC, FAvH, FRSA, FBCS, is Augustus De Morgan Professor of Logic at the University of London. He has written over 300 papers in logic and over 20 books. He is Editor-in-Chief of several leading journals and has published over 50 handbooks of logic volumes. He is a world authority on applied logics and is one of the directors and founder of the UK charity the International Federation of Computational Logic