Practical Specification of Belief Manipulation in Games

Abstract

Actions that affect knowledge asymmetrically between agents occur in numerous domains, from card games such as poker to the secure transmission of information. Applications in such domains often depend on reflection over knowledge, including what an agent knows about what other agents know. We are interested in enabling formal specification of these systems which may be used for executable prototyping as well as verification and other formal reasoning. Dynamic Epistemic Logic provides a formal basis for such reasoning, but is often prohibitively cumbersome to use in practice. We present an implementation and macro system called Ostari, backed by a particular flavor of Dynamic Epistemic Logic, which allows us to scale the ideas to more realistic problems. We demonstrate how actions that manipulate agents' beliefs can be written concisely and how this capability can be applied to modeling a popular card game by utilizing our system's ability to execute action sequences, answer queries about knowledge states, and find action sequences to satisfy a particular goal.