On perfect introspection with quantifying-in

摘要

Reasoning about knowledge, once the exclusive arena for philosophical investigation, has in the last two decades become an active field of research in a variety of scientific disciplines. These include artificial intelligence, economics, linguistics, philosophy and theoretical computer science. While the issues arising in the different disciplines share a significant degree of commonality, the separate communities pursued their respective research efforts fairly independently for quite a while. The First conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge (TARK I) was organized by Joe Halpern in 1986, with the goal of bringing together researchers from these fields to discuss issues of mutual interest. The conference was a great success, and was followed by a second and third conference in 1988 and 1990. The first three TARK conferences have brought the interdisciplinary community attending this conference closer together, a fact that is reflected in a growing body of interdisciplinary research in the field. >We are now holding TARK IV, the fourth biennial conference in the series. The interdisciplinary program committee consisted of Johan van Benthem (University of Amsterdam), Adam Brandenburger (Harvard University), Ronald Fagin (IBM Almaden Research Center), Anil Gupta (Indiana University), Vassos Hadzilacos (University of Toronto), William Harper (University of Western Ontario), David Israel (SRI International), Hector Levesque (University of Toronto), Yoram Moses (Weizmann Institute), Phil Reny (University of Western Ontario), Dov Samet (Tel Aviv University), and Yoav Shoham (Stanford University). The committee carefully considered all of the 70 papers submitted to the conference. At least four and usually six members of the committee read each submitted paper. Only 17 papers were selected for presentation at the conference. (One of the papers was later withdrawn by the author.) Besides ensuring that only papers of very high quality appear in the conference, the committee had to restrict the number of papers in order to allow the conference participants plenty of time for rump sessions and informal discussions. Thus, many good papers had to be rejected. >This volume consists of extended abstracts of those 16 accepted papers, as well as a couple of invited talks and a tutorial to be presented in the conference. Moreover, we added two papers that cover tutorials presented in the 1990 conference and generated a great deal of interest. We believe this volume provides a good interdisciplinary selection of state of the art research on the topic of reasoning about knowledge. Despite the careful job done by the program committee, none of the extended abstracts appearing here was formally refereed, and it is expected that most of them will appear in more polished and complete form in refereed journals. I'd like to thank Karl Shell and Ehud Kalai, the general editors of the Journal of Economic Theory and of Games and Economic Behavior, respectively, for announcing that appearance of abstracts in the TARK IV proceedings will not affect the publication of full length versions of these papers in their journals. This made it easier for economists to submit papers to the conference. I hope that this will be repeated in future conferences as well. >The conference was sponsored and made possible by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Travel grants for students were provided by the American Association for Intelligence. Supplementary funds and administrative support were provided by Cambridge Research Lab and by IBM Almaden Research Center.