Computer Science Colloquium

Thursday, September 19th, 4:15pm, room 9204/05

Rohit Parikh

Brooklyn College & The Graduate Center

Epistemic Logic, Games and Social Software: same old and new ideas

Epistemic reasoning has gradually matured from being the domain of philosophers and logicians to becoming relevant also in economics and social science.  But theoretical computer science and game theory remain as two of the most powerful tools which epistemologists can wield.

Epistemic tools have been used by writers as different from each other as Shakespeare, Shaw and O’Henry.  Even the Indian epic Mahabharata contains stories whose main point is epistemic.

But more recently there has been technical work devoted to what might be called applied epistemic logic, and CUNY has been one of the leaders.  CUNY collaborators include Walter Dean, Cagil Tasdemir and Andreas Witzel.  Eric Pacuit, who got his doctorate from CUNY some years ago, has now become a household word in epistemic circles.  And Artemov’s own interest in Game theory has a very strong epistemic flavor.

There are also very important questions about the extent to which epistemic considerations enter into animal behavior.  Major figures like Peter Godfrey-Smith and Robert Lurz at CUNY have contributed to this field which began with some questions raised by Premack and Woodruff at U. Penn.

We cannot possibly do justice to all this work in a single talk but will try to give a bird’s eye view and indicate one or two “cute” results.

The Colloquium is supported by generous contributions from the Bloomberg, Information Builders, Inc., and Netlogic, Inc.

365 Fifth Ave, New York City 10016 | Room 4319 | Phone: 212.817.8190 | Fax: 212.817.1510 | compsci@gc.cuny.edu