Computation as conversation
Johan van Benthem · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2011
The analysis of information and interactive agency in this book crucially involved ideas from computer science. Conversation and games are processes with stepwise changes of information states. And even without a computer around – only hearts and minds – these updates resemble acts of computation: sequential for individuals, and parallel for groups. Conversation as computation turned out a fruitful metaphor – and we recall some illustrations below. But ideas also flow the other way. One can take the logical dynamics stance to computer science, inverting the metaphor to computation is conversation . We illustrate the latter direction, too, ‘epistemizing’ and ‘gamifying’ various algorithmic tasks. This fits with how modern computer systems have moved away from single physical devices to societies of agents engaged in a wide variety of tasks. Thus, in the end, our two directions belong together. Humans and machines mix naturally in logical theory, witness the dynamics of email users in Chapter 4. And joint agency by humans and machines is also a cognitive reality in practice, as we will emphasize in Chapter 16.