Reasoning About Knowledge

Front Cover
Reasoning about knowledge—particularly the knowledge of agents who reason about the world and each other's knowledge—was once the exclusive province of philosophers and puzzle solvers. More recently, this type of reasoning has been shown to play a key role in a surprising number of contexts, from understanding conversations to the analysis of distributed computer algorithms. Reasoning About Knowledge is the first book to provide a general discussion of approaches to reasoning about knowledge and its applications to distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and game theory. It brings eight years of work by the authors into a cohesive framework for understanding and analyzing reasoning about knowledge that is intuitive, mathematically well founded, useful in practice, and widely applicable. The book is almost completely self-contained and should be accessible to readers in a variety of disciplines, including computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, and game theory. Each chapter includes exercises and bibliographic notes.
 

Contents

A Model for Knowledge
2
X
10
7
78
viii
87
15
94
38
101
Knowledge in MultiAgent Systems
119
Protocols and Programs
163
5
362
49
371
Knowledge and Computation
389
65
462
70
472
73
482
163
486
Symbol Index
489

Common Knowledge and Agreement
189
Computing Common Knowledge
230
KnowledgeBased Programming
253
Evolving Knowledge
303
Logical Omniscience
335
189
493
74
495
84
501
271
515
Copyright

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About the author (2004)

Ronald Fagin is Manager of the Foundations of Computer Science Group, Computer Science Department, IBM Almaden Research Center.

Joseph Y. Halpern is Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He is the author of Actual Causality and the coauthor of Reasoning about Knowledge, both published by the MIT Press.

Yoram Moses is Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

Bibliographic information