9th edition

Sep 6 2017

Agenda

6:30 pm

What do auto drivers, dictators and distributed systems have in common?

Why do drivers in India avoid eye contact while denying you space? Why do dictators hate town squares and a free press? What does the theory of mind have to say about autism? Why or how do people indulge in real estate speculation? What does the phrase "our eyes met" mean?
Amazingly enough, it turns out that logicians and philosophers have one language and logic to study these diverse observations. 'Knowledge logic' is a field of study that reduces such questions to "levels of knowledge", characterised by statements such as "I know", "I know that you know", "Everyone knows that I know" and so on, to an infinite level of nesting.
In recent times, this logic has been applied to distributed systems. For example, protocol specifications refer to "knowing" when a message can be safely delivered to a higher layer, or in consensus protocols where servers must agree on something (e.g. whether to commit or to rollback a transaction), a server must 'know' what the other server 'knows', and know that the other server knows what the first one knows, and so on.
The talk is a brief and accessible introduction to basic propositional and predicate logic, then temporal logic and knowledge logic, followed by a discussion of a hierarchy of knowledge, using examples from the list above. No background on logic (beyond the very basic) is necessary.
Once you know about "common knowledge", you cannot unknow it.

By: Sriram Srinivasan

7:30 pm

Q n A

8:00 pm

Networking

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