Interleaved contractions
Wiebe van der Hoek, Maarten de Rijke · 1999
We study an approach to concurrent contractions, that is, to simultaneous contractions performed by multiple agents. Using ideas from the semantics of programming we adopt an interleaved approach to reason about concurrent contractions. Although many of the notions from the traditional Gardenfors approach transfer to this setting, our approach also forces us to depart from the Gardenfors framework in important ways. We present laws describing rational concurrent contractions, as well as a construction that satisfies these laws. 1 Introduction In real life concurrent accessing of data is the rule. Multiple agents are working on the same theory, and multiple copies of some data are kept in different locations. Typical examples include scientific research or writing a joint-publication, and practical applications vary from networks of personal computers and workstations sharing some common information to widely distributed applications such as automatic teller machines. The primary advan...