Knowledge = Observation + Memory + Computation

Blaise Genest, Doron Peled, Sven Schewe

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

We compare three notions of knowledge in concurrent system: memoryless knowledge, knowledge of perfect recall, and causal knowledge. Memoryless knowledge is based only on the current state of a process, knowledge of perfect recall can take into account the local history of a process, and causal knowledge depends on the causal past of a process, which comprises the information a process can obtain when all processes exchange the information they have when performing joint transitions. We compare these notions in terms of knowledge strength, number of bits required to store this information, and the complexity of checking if a given process has a given knowledge. We show that all three notions of knowledge can be implemented using finite memory. Causal knowledge proves to be strictly more powerful than knowledge with perfect recall, which in turn proves to be strictly more powerful than memoryless knowledge. We show that keeping track of causal knowledge is cheaper than keeping track of knowledge of perfect recall.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
EditorsAndrew Pitts
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages215-229
Number of pages15
ISBN (Print)9783662466773
DOIs
StatePublished - 2015
Event18th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures, FoSSaCS 2015 Held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2015 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: 11 Apr 201518 Apr 2015

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9034

Conference

Conference18th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures, FoSSaCS 2015 Held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period11/04/1518/04/15

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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