Quarter: Spring
Instructor: Yoav Shoham
Meeting Times: Mondays, 2:15PM - 4:05PM
First Class: Monday, March 29
Location: Y2E2111

Email: shoham AT stanford DOT edu
Office Hours: By Arrangement
Office: Gates 140

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

Course Description: This course looks at the use of modal, temporal and dynamic logics to reason about knowledge, belief, their dynamics, agency and intention, and some aspects of game theory. Many of the course readings come from the Multiagent Systems textbook, which is available online.

Note that the course is not intended as a general introduction to knowledge representation. A more descriptive course title would have been "Rationality and (Mostly Modal) Logic". 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. preference, and logic and game theory, 4. logics of individual and collective action, and 5. logics of motivational mental attitudes,.

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.

Recitation sessions will be on Wednesday from 2:15 to 3:05 in 260-004. The topic for each session will be announced in class on Monday.

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 Semantic Introduction to Modal Logic in: Handbook of Modal Logic, P. Blackburn, J. van Bentem and F. Wolter editors, Elsevier, 2007 (pdf)
• Notes on basic modal logic from Phil 151.
  • Eric Pacuit, Notes on Modal Logic (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
• 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)

Everyone will complete a final paper, of 5-8 pages, on some topic related to the course. It is due June 4 at noon.

Attendance and participation in class will contribute toward the final grade. Attendance in recitation sessions is obligatory, to the extent that students will be held resonsible for (new) material covered. It will be announced in class on Mondays what the recitation that week will cover.

There will also be three homework assignments, distributed throughout the quarter. The homework collectively will be worth the same as the final paper in calculating the course grade.