Causality in Device Behavior

CMU-CS-85-118

Yumi Iwasaki, Herbert A. Simon

February 1985

This paper shows how formal characterizations of causality and of the method of comparative statics, long used in economics, thermodynamics and other domains, can be applied to clarify and make rigorous the qualitative causal calculus recently proposed by de Kleer and Brown oot De Kleer, J., and Brown, J.S., A qualitative physics based on confluences. Artificial Intelligence , 24:7-83, 1984. . The formalization shows exactly what assumptions are required to carry out causal analysis of a system of interdependent variables in equilibrium and to propagate disturbances through such a system.

28 pages

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