Sleeping Beauty Reconsidered: Conditioning and Reflection in Asynchronous Systems

A careful analysis of conditioning in the Sleeping Beauty problem is done, using the formal model for reasoning about knowledge and probability developed by Halpern and Tuttle. While the Sleeping Beauty problem has been viewed as revealing problems with conditioning in the presence of imperfect recall, the analysis done here reveals that the problems are not so much due to imperfect recall as to asynchrony. The implications of this analysis for van Fraassen's Reflection Principle and Savage's Sure-Thing Principle are considered.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appears in Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference (KR 2004). This version will appear in Oxford Studies in Epistemolog

A principled information valuation for communications during multi-agent coordination

Decentralised coordination in multi-agent systems is typically achieved using communication. However, in many cases, communication is expensive to utilise because there is limited bandwidth, it may be dangerous to communicate, or communication may simply be unavailable at times. In this context, we argue for a rational approach to communication --- if it has a cost, the agents should be able to calculate a value of communicating. By doing this, the agents can balance the need to communicate with the cost of doing so. In this research, we present a novel model of rational communication that uses information theory to value communications, and employ this valuation in a decision theoretic coordination mechanism. A preliminary empirical evaluation of the benefits of this approach is presented in the context of the RoboCupRescue simulator