Prospective logic agents

As we face the actual possibility of modelling agent systems capable of non-deterministic self-evolution, we are confronted with the problem of having several different possible futures for any single agent. This issue brings the challenge of how to allow such evolving agents to be able to look ahead, prospectively, into such hypothetical futures, in order to determine the best courses of evolution from their own present, and thence to prefer amongst them. The concept of prospective logic programs is presented as a way to address such issues. We start by building on previous theoretical background, on evolving programs and on abduction, to construe a framework for prospection and describe an abstract procedure for its materialisation. We take on several examples of modelling prospective logic programs that illustrate the proposed concepts and briefly discuss the ACORDA system, a working implementation of the previously presented procedure. We conclude by elaborating about current limitations of the system...