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Journal of Logic and Computation Advance Access first published online on February 15, 2008
This version published online on March 4, 2008
Journal of Logic and Computation, doi:10.1093/logcom/exm091
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© The Author, 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Original papers

Reconstructing an Agent's Epistemic State from Observations about its Beliefs and Non-beliefs

Richard Booth

Mahasarakham University, Faculty of Informatics, Mahasarakham 44150, Thailand.
E-mail: richard.b{at}msu.ac.th

Alexander Nittka

University of Leipzig, Department of Computer Science, Leipzig 04103, Germany.
E-mail: nittka{at}informatik.uni-leipzig.de

Received 1 December 2007.

We look at the problem in belief revision of trying to make inferences about what an agent believed—or will believe—at a given moment, based on an observation of how the agent has responded to some sequence of previous belief revision inputs over time. We adopt a ‘reverse engineering’ approach to this problem. Assuming a framework for iterated belief revision which is based on sequences, we construct a model of the agent that ‘best explains’ the observation. Further considerations on this best-explaining model then allow inferences about the agent's epistemic behaviour to be made. We also provide an algorithm which computes this best explanation.

Keywords: Belief revision; non-monotonic reasoning; iterated revision; non-prioritised revision; rational closure; rational explanation; multi-agent systems

This version shows Algorithm 1 displayed correctly



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This Article
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Right arrow Articles by Booth, R.
Right arrow Articles by Nittka, A.
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