Dynamic Epistemic Logic is the logic of knowledge change. This book provides various logics to support such formal specifications, including proof systems. Concrete examples and epistemic puzzles enliven the exposition. The book also offers exercises with answers. It is suitable for graduate courses in logic. Many examples, exercises, and thorough completeness proofs and expressivity results are included. A companion web page offers slides for lecturers and exams for further practice.
Epistemic logic and, more generally, logics of knowledge and belief, originated with philosophers such as Jaakko Hintikka and David Lewis in the early 1960s. Since then, such logics have played a significant role not only in philosophy, but also in computer science, artificial intelligence, and economics. This handbook reports significant progress in a field that, while more mature, continues to be very active. This book should make it easier for new researchers to enter the field, and give experts a chance to appreciate work in related areas. The book starts with a gentle introduction to the logics of knowledge and belief; it gives an overview of the area and the material covered in the book. The following eleven chapters, each written by a leading researcher (or researchers), cover the topics of only knowing, awareness, knowledge and probability, knowledge and time, the dynamics of knowledge and of belief, model checking, game theory, agency, knowledge and ability, and security protocols. The chapters have been written so that they can be read independently and in any order. Each chapter ends with a section of notes that provides some historical background, including references, and a detailed bibliography.
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.
Modal logics, originally conceived in philosophy, have recently found many applications in computer science, artificial intelligence, the foundations of mathematics, linguistics and other disciplines. Celebrated for their good computational behaviour, modal logics are used as effective formalisms for talking about time, space, knowledge, beliefs, actions, obligations, provability, etc. However, the nice computational properties can drastically change if we combine some of these formalisms into a many-dimensional system, say, to reason about knowledge bases developing in time or moving objects.To study the computational behaviour of many-dimensional modal logics is the main aim of this book. On the one hand, it is concerned with providing a solid mathematical foundation for this discipline, while on the other hand, it shows that many seemingly different applied many-dimensional systems (e.g., multi-agent systems, description logics with epistemic, temporal and dynamic operators, spatio-temporal logics, etc.) fit in perfectly with this theoretical framework, and so their computational behaviour can be analyzed using the developed machinery.We start with concrete examples of applied one- and many-dimensional modal logics such as temporal, epistemic, dynamic, description, spatial logics, and various combinations of these. Then we develop a mathematical theory for handling a spectrum of 'abstract' combinations of modal logics - fusions and products of modal logics, fragments of first-order modal and temporal logics - focusing on three major problems: decidability, axiomatizability, and computational complexity. Besides the standard methods of modal logic, the technical toolkit includes the method of quasimodels, mosaics, tilings, reductions to monadic second-order logic, algebraic logic techniques. Finally, we apply the developed machinery and obtained results to three case studies from the field of knowledge representation and reasoning: temporal epistemic logics for reasoning about multi-agent systems, modalized description logics for dynamic ontologies, and spatio-temporal logics.The genre of the book can be defined as a research monograph. It brings the reader to the front line of current research in the field by showing both recent achievements and directions of future investigations (in particular, multiple open problems). On the other hand, well-known results from modal and first-order logic are formulated without proofs and supplied with references to accessible sources.The intended audience of this book is logicians as well as those researchers who use logic in computer science and artificial intelligence. More specific application areas are, e.g., knowledge representation and reasoning, in particular, terminological, temporal and spatial reasoning, or reasoning about agents. And we also believe that researchers from certain other disciplines, say, temporal and spatial databases or geographical information systems, will benefit from this book as well.Key Features:• Integrated approach to modern modal and temporal logics and their applications in artificial intelligence and computer science• Written by internationally leading researchers in the field of pure and applied logic• Combines mathematical theory of modal logic and applications in artificial intelligence and computer science• Numerous open problems for further research• Well illustrated with pictures and tables
Strategic behavior is the key to social interaction, from the ever-evolving world of living beings to the modern theatre of designed computational agents. Strategies can make or break participants’ aspirations, whether they are selling a house, playing the stock market, or working toward a treaty that limits global warming. This book aims at understanding the phenomenon of strategic behavior in its proper width and depth. A number of experts have combined forces in order to create a comparative view of the different frameworks for strategic reasoning in social interactions that have been developed in game theory, computer science, logic, linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive and social sciences. The chapters are organized in three topic-based sections, namely reasoning about games; formal frameworks for strategies; and strategies in social situations. The book concludes with a discussion on the future of logical studies of strategies.
This book develops a view of logic as a theory of information-driven agency and intelligent interaction between many agents - with conversation, argumentation and games as guiding examples. It provides one uniform account of dynamic logics for acts of inference, observation, questions and communication, that can handle both update of knowledge and revision of beliefs. It then extends the dynamic style of analysis to include changing preferences and goals, temporal processes, group action and strategic interaction in games. Throughout, the book develops a mathematical theory unifying all these systems, and positioning them at the interface of logic, philosophy, computer science and game theory. A series of further chapters explores repercussions of the 'dynamic stance' for these areas, as well as cognitive science.
This volume, the 6th volume in the DRUMS Handbook series, is part of the after math of the successful ESPRIT project DRUMS (Defeasible Reasoning and Un certainty Management Systems) which took place in two stages from 1989-1996. In the second stage (1993-1996) a work package was introduced devoted to the topics Reasoning and Dynamics, covering both the topics of 'Dynamics of Rea soning', where reasoning is viewed as a process, and 'Reasoning about Dynamics', which must be understood as pertaining to how both designers of and agents within dynamic systems may reason about these systems. The present volume presents work done in this context. This work has an emphasis on modelling and formal techniques in the investigation of the topic "Reasoning and Dynamics", but it is not mere theory that occupied us. Rather research was aimed at bridging the gap between theory and practice. Therefore also real-life applications of the modelling techniques were considered, and we hope this also shows in this volume, which is focused on the dynamics of reasoning processes. In order to give the book a broader perspective, we have invited a number of well-known researchers outside the project but working on similar topics to contribute as well. We have very pleasant recollections of the project, with its lively workshops and other meetings, with the many sites and researchers involved, both within and outside our own work package.
