Arbitrary Announcements in Propositional Belief Revision

Aaron Hunter , François Schwarzentruber (1)

1 DISTRIBCOM - Distributed and Iterative Algorithms for the Management of Telecommunications Systems

Public announcements cause each agent in a group to modify their beliefs to incorporate some new piece of information, while simultaneously being aware that all other agents are doing the same. Given some fixed goal formula, it is natural to ask if there exists an announcement that will make the formula true in a multi-agent context. This problem is known to be undecidable in a general modal setting , where the presence of nested beliefs can lead to complex dynamics. In this paper, we consider not necessarily truthful public announcements in the setting of propositional belief revision. We are given a goal formula for each agent, and we are interested in finding a single announcement that will make each agent believe the corresponding goal following AGM-style belief revision. If the goals are inconsistent, then this can be seen as a form of ampliative reasoning. We prove that determining if there is an arbitrary public announcement in this setting is not only decidable, but that it is simpler than the corresponding problem in the most simplified modal logics. Moreover, we argue that propo-sitional announcements and beliefs are sufficient for modelling many practical problems, including simple robot controllers.

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Aaron Hunter, François Schwarzentruber. Arbitrary Announcements in Propositional Belief Revision. DARe@IJCAI, 2015, Buenos Aires, Argentina. ⟨hal-02534088⟩