3,862 research outputs found
Introduction to Iltis: An Interactive, Web-Based System for Teaching Logic
Logic is a foundation for many modern areas of computer science. In
artificial intelligence, as a basis of database query languages, as well as in
formal software and hardware verification --- modelling scenarios using logical
formalisms and inferring new knowledge are important skills for going-to-be
computer scientists. The Iltis project aims at providing a web-based,
interactive system that supports teaching logical methods. In particular the
system shall (a) support to learn to model knowledge and to infer new knowledge
using propositional logic, modal logic and first-order logic, and (b) provide
immediate feedback and support to students. This article presents a
prototypical system that currently supports the above tasks for propositional
logic. First impressions on its use in a second year logic course for computer
science students are reported
"Freedom" through Repression: Epistemic Closure in Agricultural Trade Negotiations
A central concern of critical theory is that of how the forces of Modern reason cause certain logics to become reified in the name of rational progress. Two such logics â the ongoing spread of liberal capitalism, and territorial particularism â are simultaneously embodied within social institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) that regulate the global economy, a phenomenon that occurs on the premise of maximising global welfare. Building upon a critical reading of JĂŒrgen Habermas' theory of communicative action, this article undertakes an empirical immanent critique of the extent to which such logics repress the possibility of normative imperatives being considered within agricultural trade negotiations. Specifically, it argues that the dialectic of functionalist and communicative rationality, operating as a theoretical heuristic, reveals that the DDA is susceptible to an ethical indictment that arises from its inability to countenance the alternatives to the dual logics of neo-liberalism and state-interest that could otherwise emerge from a free and rational discussion. The nature of the WTO as a site of social action is revealed to be that of a closed epistemic community in which important normative claims are repressed, and as such, one in which the underlying rational bases for communication are fundamentally distorted
Knowledge and Blameworthiness
Blameworthiness of an agent or a coalition of agents is often defined in
terms of the principle of alternative possibilities: for the coalition to be
responsible for an outcome, the outcome must take place and the coalition
should have had a strategy to prevent it. In this article we argue that in the
settings with imperfect information, not only should the coalition have had a
strategy, but it also should have known that it had a strategy, and it should
have known what the strategy was. The main technical result of the article is a
sound and complete bimodal logic that describes the interplay between knowledge
and blameworthiness in strategic games with imperfect information
Logics of knowledge and action: critical analysis and challenges
International audienceWe overview the most prominent logics of knowledge and action that were proposed and studied in the multiagent systems literature. We classify them according to these two dimensions, knowledge and action, and moreover introduce a distinction between individual knowledge and group knowledge, and between a nonstrategic an a strategic interpretation of action operators. For each of the logics in our classification we highlight problematic properties. They indicate weaknesses in the design of these logics and call into question their suitability to represent knowledge and reason about it. This leads to a list of research challenges
Reasoning about Knowledge and Strategies under Hierarchical Information
Two distinct semantics have been considered for knowledge in the context of
strategic reasoning, depending on whether players know each other's strategy or
not. The problem of distributed synthesis for epistemic temporal specifications
is known to be undecidable for the latter semantics, already on systems with
hierarchical information. However, for the other, uninformed semantics, the
problem is decidable on such systems. In this work we generalise this result by
introducing an epistemic extension of Strategy Logic with imperfect
information. The semantics of knowledge operators is uninformed, and captures
agents that can change observation power when they change strategies. We solve
the model-checking problem on a class of "hierarchical instances", which
provides a solution to a vast class of strategic problems with epistemic
temporal specifications on hierarchical systems, such as distributed synthesis
or rational synthesis
The Complexity of Synthesizing Uniform Strategies
We investigate uniformity properties of strategies. These properties involve
sets of plays in order to express useful constraints on strategies that are not
\mu-calculus definable. Typically, we can state that a strategy is
observation-based. We propose a formal language to specify uniformity
properties, interpreted over two-player turn-based arenas equipped with a
binary relation between plays. This way, we capture e.g. games with winning
conditions expressible in epistemic temporal logic, whose underlying
equivalence relation between plays reflects the observational capabilities of
agents (for example, synchronous perfect recall). Our framework naturally
generalizes many other situations from the literature. We establish that the
problem of synthesizing strategies under uniformity constraints based on
regular binary relations between plays is non-elementary complete.Comment: In Proceedings SR 2013, arXiv:1303.007
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