Hans in the Wild
(Invited Lecture)
Hans van Ditmarsch
Department of Computer Science
University of Otago
Abstract
In this talk I will present some reality checks, and questions on the
relevance of specific logical methods, that I encountered when
modelling the dynamics of games and other multi-agent system dynamics.
The first case study is the game of Pit. Pit is a multi-player card
game that simulates the commodities trading market, and where actions
consist of bidding and of swapping cards. Its dynamical game features
can be described in the extension of a standard language for dynamic
epistemics. This formalization is then used to outline the game theory
for a simplification of the Pit game, which uncovers some interesting
equilibria. It is quite hard to compute optimal strategies for
generalizations of this very simple game, let alone for the 'real' Pit
game. Does this help human players to win Pit?
The second case study is the 'murder mystery' game of Cluedo. It turns
out that the complexity of models describing the information in the
game gets smaller - but only barely so - as a result of subsequent game
actions. If the game had been designed differently, for example, if
apart from a murder weapon, murder room, and a murder suspect, one
would have had to determine as well the motive for the murder, the
complexity might have increased
instead. Would that have made the game less fun? Or less playable? Did
the inventor of Cluedo know that, back in the 1940s? How do I become a
better Cluedo player anyway?
The third case study, time permitting, is about the use of a logic for
the dynamics of knowledge and
belief, as expressed by preferences, when modelling conversational
implicatures and presuppositions in dialogue, and also, in a somewhat
different setting of security protocols, intentions. Does this increase
our insight into communicative processes? How does this compare with
probabilistic approaches? Can it be used in dialogue systems?
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