The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth: An Indexed Bibliography to the Literature ofTruth Maintenance Systems

Papers that explicitly deal with issues on truth maintenance; and (3) Papers that deal with applications of truth maintenance and discuss the issues at some important length (thus we have excluded papers that reference truth maintenance as a possible technique to be used without any further discussion of how it could be used). We did not attempt to present the material from a tutorial perspective and thus we assume some previous knowledge in the area of truth maintenance systems. We are also aware that a work of this kind can never be complete and that, if not updated, will become obsolete a short time after publication. We will try to publish updates to the bibliography and we will be very glad to be informed about new work being developed in the area of truth maintenance, as well as work in this area which was not mentioned here due to lack of our knowledge. Truth maintenance is a collection of techniques for doing belief revision. A truth maintenance system’s task is to maintain a set of beliefs in such a way that (1) they are not known to be contradictory and (2) no belief is kept without a reason. Jon Doyle [Doyle 79] is recognized to have initiated the work on the field with the development of the TMS (Truth Maintenance System), the first system where the dependencies among propositions and the depen‘I can’t believe that!’ said Alice ‘Can’t you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breadth, and shut your eyes.’ Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said: ‘one can’t believe i m p o s s i b l e things.’ ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass