Eric Pacuit
University of Amsterdam

``A Logic of Knowledge and Communication for Social Software"

Abstract:

The main intuition behind social software is that there is a close analogy between computer software and social procedures. For example, just as registers in a computer are continually updated as a program is executed, the information of each agent changes as a social procedure is executed. We present a logic of knowledge and communication and discuss to what extent it can be used to reason about social procedures.

The logic is based on Moss and Parikh's bimodal logic of knowledge and effort called Topologic. We show how to extend Topologic to the case of many agents who are assumed to have some private information at the outset, but may refine their information by acquiring information possessed by other agents, possibly via yet other agents. We assume that the agents are connected by a communication graph. In the communication graph, an edge from agent i to agent j means that agent i can directly receive information from agent j. Agent i can then refine its own information by learning information that j has, including information acquired by j from another agent, k. We introduce a multi-agent modal logic with knowledge modalities and a modality representing communication among agents.

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