Preface to the Hardcover Edition
As its title suggests, this book investigates reasoning about knowledge, in particular, reasoning about
the knowledge of agents who reason about the world and each other's knowledge. This is the type of
reasoning one often sees in puzzles or Sherlock Holmes mysteries, where we might have reasoning
such as this:
If Alice knew that Bob knew that Charlie was wearing a red shirt, then Alice would have known
that Bob would have known that Charlie couldn't have been in the pantry at midnight. But Alice
didn't know this
…
As we shall see, this type of reasoning is also important in a surprising number of other contexts.
Researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, from philosophy to economics to cryptography, have all
found that issues involving agents reasoning about other agents' knowledge are of great relevance to
them. We attempt to provide here a framework for understanding and analyzing reasoning about
knowledge that is intuitive, mathematically well founded, useful in practice, and widely applicable.
The book is almost completely self-contained. We do expect the reader to be familiar with propositional
logic; a nodding acquaintance with distributed systems may be helpful to appreciate some of our
examples, but it is not essential. Our hope is that the book will be accessible to readers from a number
of different disciplines, including computer science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and game theory.
While proofs of important theorems are included, the non-mathematically-oriented reader should be
able to skip them, while still following the main thrust of the book.
We have tried to make the book modular, so that, whenever possible, separate chapters can be read
independently. At the end of
Chapter 1
there is a brief overview of the book and a table of
dependencies. Much of this material was taught a number of times by the second author in one-quarter
courses at Stanford University and
by the third author in one-semester courses at the Weizmann
Institute of Science. Suggestions for subsets of material that can be covered can also be found at the
end of
Chapter 1
.
Many of the details that are not covered in the main part of the text of each chapter are relegated to the
exercises. As well, the exercises cover material somewhat tangential-but still of interest!-to the main
thrust of the chapter. We recommend that the reader at least look over all the exercises in each
chapter. Far better, of course, would be to do them all (or at least a reasonable subset). Problems that
are somewhat more difficult are marked with *, and even more difficult problems are marked with **.
Each chapter ends with a section of notes. These notes provide references to the material covered in
each chapter (as well as the theorems that are stated but not proved) and, occasionally, more details
on some points not covered in the chapter. The references appearing in the notes are to the latest
version of the material we could find. In many cases, earlier versions appeared in conference
proceedings. The dates of the references that appear in the notes therefore do not provide a
chronological account of the contributions to the field. While we attempt to provide reasonably
extensive coverage of the literature in these notes, the field is too large for our coverage to be
complete. We apologize for the inadvertent omission of relevant references.
The book concludes with a bibliography, a symbol index, and an index. Many people helped us in many
ways in the preparation of this book, and we are thankful to all of them. Daphne Koller deserves a very
special note of thanks. She did a superb job of proofreading the almost-final draft of the book. Besides
catching many typographical errors, she gave us numerous suggestions on improving the presentation
in every chapter. We are very grateful to her. We would also like to thank Johan van Benthem, Adam
Grove, Vassos Hadzilacos, Lane Hemaspaandra and the students of CS 487 at the University of
Rochester, Wil Janssen, Hector Levesque, Murray Mazer, Ron van der Meyden, Jan Pachl, Karen
Rudie, Ambuj Singh, Elias Thijsse, Mark Tuttle, and Lenore Zuck, for their useful comments and
criticisms; Johan van Benthem, Brian Chellas, David Makinson, and Krister Segerberg for their help in
tracking down the history of modal logic; and T. C. Chen and Brian Coan for pointing out the quotations
at the beginning of
Chapters 2
and
3
, respectively. Finally, the second and third authors would like to
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收藏 13.88MB PDF 举报 
sstoney2013-03-16书本身很不错，就是转了以后每一页都有水印，比较难看，建议上传原版chm
rogerwengz2011-11-15chm格式转成的pdf文件，楼主辛苦了。不过由于是chm格式转过来的，所以有写错误。特别是公式，有些都乱掉了。 不过还是谢谢分享！
