Reasoning about Knowledge

by Ronald Fagin, Yoram Moses, Joseph Y. Halpern

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262061627
• ISBN13: 9780262061629
• Release Date: August 1995
• Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
• Length: 477 Pages
• Weight: 2.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 7.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Good Book

This is a good book, though it's hard to penetrate at times. It's comprehensive and you learn a lot going thru it slowly; my background is in economics/game theory so this contains a treatment of reasoning & knowledge one usually doesn't see in economics. My only -- and major -- gripe with the book is that it sometimes becomes very involved with a particular theorem/result without discussing why that is an interesting question/puzzle. As such, it's a great book when you already have motivation to learn this stuff and a puzzle to which you want to apply its techniques.

Great book

I have used only part of the book. Most of the book is explained using the 'muddy children' example, which also serves to illustrate the complexities in automating a trivial puzzle for humans. The book also contains accessible coverage of Kripke structures and Aumann diagrams. This is quite a accessible introduction to a fairly complex subject.