The Persistence of False Memory: Brain in a Vat Despite Perfect Clocks

摘要

We extend a recently introduced epistemic reasoning framework for multi-agent systems with byzantine faulty asynchronous agents by incorporating features like reliable communication, time-bounded communication, multicasting, synchronous and lockstep synchronous agents. We use this extension framework for analyzing fault detection abilities of synchronous and lockstep synchronous agents and show that even perfectly synchronized clocks cannot be used to avoid "brain-in-a-vat" scenarios.