Reasoning About Knowledge

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 477 pages
• Published by: The MIT Press August 14, 1995
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0262061627
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0262061629
• Book Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches
• Weighs: 2.6 pounds

Product Description
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.

Book Info
First book to provide a general discussion of approaches to reasoning about knowledge and its applications to distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and game theory. DLC: Knowledge, Theory of.

Reader Reviews
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.