MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: CERN/3.0 Date: Sunday, 24-Nov-96 22:21:55 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 1924 Last-Modified: Monday, 30-Sep-96 18:16:00 GMT
This course provides a general discussion of approaches to reasoning about knowledge and its applications to distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and game theory. We'll start by examining the well-known ``muddy children puzzle'', which demonstrates the subtleties of reasoning about knowledge of a group. We then consider a simple yet powerful formal semantic model for knowledge and a language for reasoning about knowledge whose underlying idea is that of ``possible worlds''. The rest of the course develops the model and show how it can be used to ascribe knowledge to agents in multi-agent systems. This allows us to better understand notions such as coordination and agreement. The definitions lead naturally to a notion of knowledge-based programs, a high-level tool for designing and analyzing systems.
The course follows closely the material in the book Reasoning About Knowledge, which actually was inspired by early versions of the course.