Agent communication and belief change

Abstract

The notion of multi-agents, including the communication between them, is one of the most fundamental issues to be formalized in artificia intelligence. The communication, however, is not a simple message passing. First, a rational agent should send logically consistent contents in the situation; or, he/she could be an intentional liar. Secondly, there must be a communication channel between agents, e.g., an address of the message recipient. Thirdly, the message can be publicly announced, i.e., there can be simultaneous multiple recipients; otherwise the message passing becomes a personal communication. Finally, the message recipient must adequately maintain the consistency of their belief, that is, as a result of message passing, the recipient must revise his/her belief to be logically consistent. In this talk, I overview the various researches concerning logical representation of communication and belief change, especially in terms of modal logic, where belief change is realized by the restriction of accessibility to some possible worlds. Thereafter, I show some applications of the formalization, such as logical puzzles.