Nested Beliefs, Goals, Duties, and Agents Reasoning About their Own or Each Other’s Body in the TIMUR Model: A Formalism for the Narrative of Tamerlane and the Three Painters

Abstract

This article develops two threads. The first thread argues that the narrative dimension of social interaction is important to societies of embodied agents: not only to animated avatars in virtual environments (for which, behaviour specification languages are useful, simplifying the distinct task of feeding a narrative into the system), but also, arguably, in societies of robots, because categories of patterns of action can arguably be usefully captured by modifications of levels of abstraction originally developed by structuralism for folktale studies. This first thread does not depend, for its validity, on the second thread. The other thread of this paper is to analyze a story of interaction among characters with different social positioning, such that reasoning on the body of one of them is central. We develop the analysis by resorting to episodic formulae, a method of representation developed by the present author and often applied during the last several years.