Textbook of AI

1944–, Computer scientist, AI researcher

Also known as: Patrick J. Hayes

Patrick J. Hayes is a British AI researcher whose 1969 paper with John McCarthy, Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence, introduced the situation calculus, a logic for representing change, action and time, and articulated the frame problem: how to specify, in logic, the unchanging consequences of an action without listing them all explicitly. The frame problem became one of the central technical and philosophical preoccupations of symbolic AI for thirty years.

Hayes's 1979 The Naive Physics Manifesto called for a sustained effort to formalise the commonsense knowledge of everyday physics, solids and liquids, containers and substances, motion and gravity, and was a foundational document of the commonsense reasoning subfield. He held positions at Edinburgh, Geneva, Rochester, the University of Illinois and finally the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC).