Reasoning about Knowledge

By Ronald Fagin, Yoram Moses, Joseph Y. Halpern

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262562006
• ISBN13: 9780262562003
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Bradford Book
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.0" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Good Book

This is a good book, though it's hard to penetrate at times. It's comprehensive and you learn a lot going thru it slowly; my background is in economics/game theory so this contains a treatment of reasoning & knowledge one usually doesn't see in economics. My only -- and major -- gripe with the book is that it sometimes becomes very involved with a particular theorem/result without discussing why that is an interesting question/puzzle. As such, it's a great book when you already have motivation to learn this stuff and a puzzle to which you want to apply its techniques.

Great book

I have used only part of the book. Most of the book is explained using the 'muddy children' example, which also serves to illustrate the complexities in automating a trivial puzzle for humans. The book also contains accessible coverage of Kripke structures and Aumann diagrams. This is quite a accessible introduction to a fairly complex subject.