Reasoning About Knowledge - Hardcover

Fagin, Ronald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262061627 ISBN 13: 9780262061629

Publisher: MIT Press, 1995

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

It is easy to foresee that this book will become a classic.

--Fabrizio Sebastiani, The Computer Journal

About the Author

Moshe Y. Vardi is Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering and Chair of the Computer Science Department, Rice University.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262061627
• ISBN 13: 9780262061629
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 492