Finding Common Ground for Incoherent Horn Expressions
This addresses the challenge of enabling autonomous systems to operate coherently in societies with conflicting rules, though it is incremental as it focuses on specific conditions for Horn expressions.
The paper tackles the problem of finding common ground among incoherent Horn expressions, which represent different rules of conduct for autonomous systems in shared environments, by providing a polynomial-time algorithm that computes common grounds under three sufficient conditions, and shows that removing any condition may prevent existence.
Autonomous systems that operate in a shared environment with people need to be able to follow the rules of the society they occupy. While laws are unique for one society, different people and institutions may use different rules to guide their conduct. We study the problem of reaching a common ground among possibly incoherent rules of conduct. We formally define a notion of common ground and discuss the main properties of this notion. Then, we identify three sufficient conditions on the class of Horn expressions for which common grounds are guaranteed to exist. We provide a polynomial time algorithm that computes common grounds, under these conditions. We also show that if any of the three conditions is removed then common grounds for the resulting (larger) class may not exist.