Quarter: Winter
Instructors: Eric Pacuit, Yoav Shoham and Johan van Benthem
Meeting Times: Mondays, 2:15PM - 4:05PM
First Class: Monday, April 6
Location: School of Education, RM 206

Email: epacuit AT stanford DOT edu
Office Hours: TBA
Office: Building 90, Room 92B

Email: shoham AT stanford DOT edu
Office Hours: TBA
Office: Gates 140

Email: johan AT csli DOT stanford DOT edu
Office Hours: By Appointment
Office: Building 100 Room 101B

Email: icard AT stanford DOT edu
Office Hours: TBA
Office: Building 100, Room 102K

Course Description: Studying rational agents involves many different aspects including (but not limited to) action, knowledge, belief, desires, and revision. This course covers all these ingredients toward the goal of understanding how these things work together. In fact, not all parts of this story have been developed within one single discipline. The course will also bring together several research programs: from philosophy, computer science, logic, and game theory, and try to see their various contributions in one coherent manner. So this course is also an introduction to interfaces between disciplines.

Note that this course is not intended as a general introduction to knowledge representation. Rather, it covers a few selected central topics from current research. Administratively, the course is 3 units and is the merging of two courses, CS 222 and Phil 358. (You can register for either, and the requirements are the same regardless.)

Course Material: Specific topics that will be introduced during the course include 1. logics of knowledge and belief, 2. information dynamics and belief revision, 3. logics of preference and preference change, 4. logics of motivational mental attitudes, 5. logics of individual and collective action and 6. group phenomena and issues of social choice.

Prerequisites: Required background is knowledge of propositional and first-order logic. Familiarity with modal logic is a plus, but not a requirement: we will try to set up sections providing the necessary background.

There are weekly (required) recitation sessions led by Thomas Icard.

Below is a tentative schedule with the required readings. We will continually update the schedule and reading material as the course proceeds.

• We focus on Chapter 13 & 14 in this class, but there is other material relevant for this course in the book.
  
  • Yoav Shoham and Kevin Leyton-Brown, Multiagent Systems: Algorithmic, Game-Theoretic, and Logical Foundations, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• A modern introduction to modal logic.
  • Patrick Balckburn and Johan van Benthem, A Semantics Introduction to Modal Logic in: Handbook of Modal Logic, P. Blackburn, J. van Bentem and F. Wolter editors, Elsevier, 2007 (pdf)
• An essay bringing together many of the themes discussed in this course.
  • Johan van Benthem, Information Dynamics, Rational Agency and Intelligent Interaciton Chapter 1 in Logical Dynamics of Information and Interaction, forthcoming (pdf)
• A textbook focused on epistemic logic.
  • R. Fagin, J. Halpern, Y. Moses and M. Vardi, Reasoning About Knowledge, MIT Press (1995)
• A recent textbook focused on many of the issues we discussed in this course.
  • H. van Ditmarsch, W. van der Hoek and B. Kooi, Dynamic Epistemic Logic
• A paper which provides an relatively up-to-date survey of the literature on BDI models.
  • W. van der Hoek and M. Wooldridge, Towards a logic of rational agency, Logic Journal of the IGPL, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 133-157 (pdf)

There will be 4 problem sets on the material covered in class and a final paper on a topic related to the course. Details about the paper topics will be provided later in the course.