Abstract
The relationship between knowledge and action is a fundamental one: a processor in a computer network (or a robot or a person, for that matter) should base its actions on the knowledge (or information) it has. One of the main uses of communication is passing around information that may eventually be required by the receiver in order to decide upon subsequent actions. Understanding the relationship between knowledge, action, and communication is fundamental to the design of computer network protocols, intelligent robots, etc. By looking at a number of variants of thecheating husbands puzzle, we illustrate the subtle relationship between knowledge, communication, and action in a distributed environment.
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Yoram Moses received a B.Sc. in mathematics from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in 1981, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1986. He will be spending the 1985/6 school year as a post-doctoral fellow at MIT. His major research interests are distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and the methodological foundations of computer science.
Danny Dolev received a B.Sc. in physics from the Hebrew University Jerusalem in 1971, an M.Sc. in applied mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel in 1973, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1979. After two years as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford and a year as a visiting scientist at IBM, he joined the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in 1982. His major research interests are distributed computing, reliability of distributed systems, and algorithms.
Joe Halpern received a B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1975, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1981. In between, he spent two years as the head of the mathematics department at Bawku Secondary School, in Ghana. After a year as a visiting scientist at MIT, he joined IBM in 1982. His major research interests are reasoning about knowledge, distributed computing, and logics of programs.
The work of this author was supported in part by DARPA contract N00039-82-C-0250
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Moses, Y., Dolev, D. & Halpern, J.Y. Cheating husbands and other stories: A case study of knowledge, action, and communication. Distrib Comput 1, 167–176 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01661170
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01661170