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On Agents That Have the Ability to Choose

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Abstract

We demonstrate ways to incorporate nondeterminism in a system designed to formalize the reasoning of agents concerning their abilities and the results of the actions that they may perform. We distinguish between two kinds of nondeterministic choice operators: one that expresses an internal choice, in which the agent decides what action to take, and one that expresses an external choice, which cannot be influenced by the agent. The presence of abilities in our system is the reason why the usual approaches towards nondeterminism cannot be used here. The semantics that we define for nondeterministic actions is based on the idea that composite actions are unravelled in the strings of atomic actions and tests that constitute them. The main notions used in defining this semantics are finite computation sequences and finite computation runs of actions. The results that we obtain meet our intuitions regarding events and abilities in the presence of nondeterminism.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Wiebe van der Hoek

  2. Department of Computer Science, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Bernd van Linder

  3. Department of Computer Science, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    John-Jules Meyer

Authors
  1. Wiebe van der Hoek
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  2. Bernd van Linder
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  3. John-Jules Meyer
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van der Hoek, W., van Linder, B. & Meyer, JJ. On Agents That Have the Ability to Choose. Studia Logica 66, 79–119 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026796912842

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