Title: Reasoning about Knowledge
Speaker: Prof. Thomas Ågotnes (University of Bergen)
Date & Time : 5 December 2014 (Friday), 9 – 11 am
Place: Seminar room 259, Main Teaching Building, Xixi campus, Zhejiang University

Abstract:
Do you know that I know that you know the title of this talk? In many daily situations we need to reason about what other people know, and what they know about what we know, and what they know about what we know that they know, and so on. This happens for example when we are playing certain card games, but also when we interact in more general ways. Reasoning about knowledge is not easy: humans are not very good at it. However, reasoning about knowledge is important in many scientific disciplines, including artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive science, economics, and linguistics. Thus, it is important to carefully model and analyse the principles of this type of reasoning. For this purpose, formal logic has turned out to be very useful. In the talk I will introduce and motivate the problem of reasoning about knowledge, and briefly introduce and demonstrate a logical formalism for reasoning about knowledge: epistemic logic. You don’t have to know anything about logic to understand the talk.

Reference: Hans van Ditmarsch, Wiebe van der Hoek, and Barteld Kooi. Playing cards with Hintikka. An introduction to dynamic epistemic logic. SEFA Workshop with Jaakko Hintikka, Granada, November 24-26, 2011. (Same as article in: Australasian Journal of Logic 3:108-134, 2005.)

Lecture slides: Download (6.57 MB)