Meta Agent Programs
Meta Agent Programs
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Date
1999-09-11
Authors
Dix, Juergen
Subrahmanian, V.S.
Pick, George
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Abstract
There are numerous applications where an agent \aga needs to reason
about the beliefs of another agent, as well as about the actions that
other agents may take. In Eiter/Subrahmanian/Pick the concept of an agent
program is introduced, and a language within which the operating
principles of an agent can be declaratively encoded on top of imperative
data structures is defined. In this paper we first introduce certain
belief data structures that an agent needs to maintain. Then we introduce
the concept of a \emph{Meta Agent Program} (\map), that extends the
framework of Eiter/Subrahmanian/Pick, so as to allow agents to perform
metareasoning. We build a formal semantics for \map{s}, and show how this
semantics supports not just beliefs agent a may have about agent b's
state, but also beliefs about agents b's beliefs about agent c's actions,
beliefs about b's beliefs about agent c's state, and so on. Finally, we
provide a translation that takes any \map as input and converts it into an
agent program such that there is a one-one correspondence between the
semantics of the \map and the semantics of the resulting agent program.
This correspondence allows an implementation of \map{s} to be built on top
of an implementation of agent programs.
Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-99-49