Exploring the tractability border in epistemic tasks.

We analyse the computational complexity of comparing informational structures. Intuitively, we study the complexity of deciding queries such as the following: Is Alice's epistemic information strictly coarser than Bob's? Do Alice and Bob have the same knowledge about each other's knowledge? Is it po...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Synthese Vol. 191; no. 3; pp. 371 - 409
Autores principales: Dégremont, Cédric, Kurzen, Lena, Szymanik, Jakub
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Feb2014
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:We analyse the computational complexity of comparing informational structures. Intuitively, we study the complexity of deciding queries such as the following: Is Alice's epistemic information strictly coarser than Bob's? Do Alice and Bob have the same knowledge about each other's knowledge? Is it possible to manipulate Alice in a way that she will have the same beliefs as Bob? The results show that these problems lie on both sides of the border between tractability (P) and intractability (NP-hard). In particular, we investigate the impact of assuming information structures to be partition-based (rather than arbitrary relational structures) on the complexity of various problems. We focus on the tractability of concrete epistemic tasks and not on epistemic logics describing them.