This single book has all you've been looking for, doesn't it ?	by Ronald Fagin, Joseph Y. Halpern, Yoram Moses, Moshe Y. Vardi List Price:   $68.00 Our Price:   $68.00 Living in UK? Get It Here! Living in Deutschland? Get It Here! Living in France? Get It Here!

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 ten 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. The authors start with an overview that uses the well-known "muddy children puzzle" to demonstrate the subtleties of reasoning about knowledge of a group. They go on to introduce a simple yet powerful formal semantic model for knowledge and a language for reasoning about knowledge whose underlying idea is that of "possible worlds". The remaining chapters develop the model and show how it can be used to ascribe knowledge to agents in multiagent systems. This allows us to better understand notions such as coordination and agreement. The definitions lead naturally to a notion of knowledge-based programs, a high-level tool for designing and analyzing systems. A number of detailed examples of applications of the formalism to particular problems are provided.


About the Author
Ronald Fagin is Manager of the Foundations of Computer Science Group and Joseph Y. Halpern is Research Staff Member, both at IBM Almaden Research Center. Yoram Moses is Senior Scientist in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at The Weizmann Institute of Science. Moshe Y. Vardi is Noah Harding Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science, Rice University.



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