Geometric Reasoning

Geometry is at the core of understanding and reasoning about the form of physical objects and spatial relations which are now recognized to be crucial to many applications in artificial intelligence. The 20 contributions in this book discuss research in geometric reasoning and its applications to robot path planning, vision, and solid modeling. During the 1950s when the field of artificial intelligence was emerging, there were significant attempts to develop computer programs to mechanically perform geometric reasoning. This research activity soon stagnated because the classical AI approaches of rule based inference and heuristic search failed to produce impressive geometric, reasoning ability. The extensive research reported in this book, along with supplementary review articles, reflects a renaissance of interest in recent developments in algebraic approaches to geometric reasoning that can be used to automatically prove many difficult plane geometry theorems in a few seconds on a computer. Deepak Kapur is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the State University of New York Albany. Joseph L. Mundy is a Coolidge Fellow at the Research and Development Center at General Electric. Geometric Reasoningis included in the series Special Issues from Artificial Intelligence: An International Journal. A Bradford Book