Epistemic Logic: A Survey
Wiebe van der Hoek, Laurina Verbrugge, Submitted To V. Mazalov, L. Petroshan (eds · 2001
Introduction Epistemic logic is the logic of knowledge: how do you reason about the question whether your silent admirer knows that you know that (s)he sent you an anonymous Valentine card? Is it harmful if, at a literature-exam you don't know the contents of a chapter? No, as long as you know that the examiner does not know that you do not know it. Knowing whether your neighbor knows that he regularly plays his radio so loudly that you wake up during the night, may help you to solve the problem in an appropriate way. In negotiations, it will harm you to let the other party know your `bottom-line', but it may be helpful to disclose other information about yourself, for example about some of your values. In this article, we will use examples and puzzles to give some avor of the eld and to demonstrate that the notion \\it is known that" is meaningful and interesting for researchers in theoretical computer science, articial intelligence and game theory. The rst person who wr