Reasoning About Knowledge

Reasoning about knowledge -- particularly the knowledge of agents who reason about the world and each others 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.