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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.
Finite model theory,as understoodhere, is an areaof mathematicallogic that has developed in close connection with applications to computer science, in particular the theory of computational complexity and database theory. One of the fundamental insights of mathematical logic is that our understanding of mathematical phenomena is enriched by elevating the languages we use to describe mathematical structures to objects of explicit study. If mathematics is the science of patterns, then the media through which we discern patterns, as well as the structures in which we discern them, command our attention. It isthis aspect oflogicwhichis mostprominentin model theory,“thebranchof mathematical log...
Description Logics are a family of knowledge representation languages that have been studied extensively in Artificial Intelligence over the last two decades. They are embodied in several knowledge-based systems and are used to develop various real-life applications. The Description Logic Handbook provides a thorough account of the subject, covering all aspects of research in this field, namely: theory, implementation, and applications. Its appeal will be broad, ranging from more theoretically-oriented readers, to those with more practically-oriented interests who need a sound and modern understanding of knowledge representation systems based on Description Logics. The chapters are written by some of the most prominent researchers in the field, introducing the basic technical material before taking the reader to the current state of the subject, and including comprehensive guides to the literature. In sum, the book will serve as a unique reference for the subject, and can also be used for self-study or in conjunction with Knowledge Representation and Artificial Intelligence courses.
Belief revision theory and philosophy of science both aspire to shed light on the dynamics of knowledge – on how our view of the world changes (typically) in the light of new evidence. Yet these two areas of research have long seemed strangely detached from each other, as witnessed by the small number of cross-references and researchers working in both domains. One may speculate as to what has brought about this surprising, and perhaps unfortunate, state of affairs. One factor may be that while belief revision theory has traditionally been pursued in a bottom- up manner, focusing on the endeavors of single inquirers, philosophers of science, inspired by logical empiricism, have tended to be more interested in science as a multi-agent or agent-independent phenomenon.
Propositional logic has been recognized throughout the centuries as one of the cornerstones of reasoning in philosophy and mathematics. Over time, its formalization into Boolean algebra was accompanied by the recognition that a wide range of combinatorial problems can be expressed as propositional satisfiability (SAT) problems. Because of this dual role, SAT developed into a mature, multi-faceted scientific discipline, and from the earliest days of computing a search was underway to discover how to solve SAT problems in an automated fashion. This book, the Handbook of Satisfiability, is the second, updated and revised edition of the book first published in 2009 under the same name. The handb...
Alan Turing has long proved a subject of fascination, but following the centenary of his birth in 2012, the code-breaker, computer pioneer, mathematician (and much more) has become even more celebrated with much media coverage, and several meetings, conferences and books raising public awareness of Turing's life and work. This volume will bring together contributions from some of the leading experts on Alan Turing to create a comprehensive guide to Turing that will serve as a useful resource for researchers in the area as well as the increasingly interested general reader. The book will cover aspects of Turing's life and the wide range of his intellectual activities, including mathematics, code-breaking, computer science, logic, artificial intelligence and mathematical biology, as well as his subsequent influence.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 2005, held in Edinburgh, UK in January 2005. The 24 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited articles were carefully reviewed and selected from 84 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on query languages and types, multi-dimensional data processing, algorithmic aspects, privacy and security, logic and databases, query rewriting, and query processing and data streams.
This book provides an overview of the confluence of ideas in Turing’s era and work and examines the impact of his work on mathematical logic and theoretical computer science. It combines contributions by well-known scientists on the history and philosophy of computability theory as well as on generalised Turing computability. By looking at the roots and at the philosophical and technical influence of Turing’s work, it is possible to gather new perspectives and new research topics which might be considered as a continuation of Turing’s working ideas well into the 21st century.
This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV '95, held in Liège, Belgium in July 1995. The book contains the 31 refereed full research papers selected for presentation at CAV '95 as well as abstracts or full papers of the three invited presentations. Originally oriented towards finite-state concurrent systems, CAV now covers all styles of verification approaches and a variety of application areas. The papers included range from theoretical issues to concrete applications with a certain emphasis on verification tools and the algorithms and techniques needed for their implementations. Beyond finite-state systems, real-time systems and hybrid systems are an important part of the conference.
Model checking is a computer-assisted method for the analysis of dynamical systems that can be modeled by state-transition systems. Drawing from research traditions in mathematical logic, programming languages, hardware design, and theoretical computer science, model checking is now widely used for the verification of hardware and software in industry. The editors and authors of this handbook are among the world's leading researchers in this domain, and the 32 contributed chapters present a thorough view of the origin, theory, and application of model checking. In particular, the editors classify the advances in this domain and the chapters of the handbook in terms of two recurrent themes that have driven much of the research agenda: the algorithmic challenge, that is, designing model-checking algorithms that scale to real-life problems; and the modeling challenge, that is, extending the formalism beyond Kripke structures and temporal logic. The book will be valuable for researchers and graduate students engaged with the development of formal methods and verification tools.