Meta Agent Programs
Meta Agent Programs
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Date
1998-10-15
Authors
Dix, Juergen
Subrahmanian, V. S.
Pick, George
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Abstract
There are numerous applications where one agent a needs to reason about
the beliefs of another agent, as well as about the actions that other
agents may take. Eiter et. al. introduced the concept of an agent program,
and provided a language within which the operating principles of an agent
could be declaratively encoded on top of imperative data structures. We
first introduce certain belief data structures that an agent needs to
maintain. Then we introduce the concept of a "Meta Agent Program" (MAP),
that extends the Eiter et. al. framework, so as to allow agents to peform
metareasoning. We build a formal semantics for MAPs, 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 MAPs to be built on top of
an implementation of agent programs.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-98-43)