Abstract
We introduce Arbitrary Public Announcement Logic with Memory (APALM), obtained by adding to the models a ‘memory’ of the initial states, representing the information before any communication took place (“the prior”), and adding to the syntax operators that can access this memory. We show that APALM is recursively axiomatizable (in contrast to the original Arbitrary Public Announcement Logic, for which the corresponding question is still open). We present a complete recursive axiomatization, that uses a natural finitary rule, we study this logic’s expressivity and the appropriate notion of bisimulation.
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- 1.
BAPAL is a very weak version, allowing \(\square \varphi \) to quantify over only purely propositional announcements - no epistemic formulas.
- 2.
APAL\(^+\) is known to be decidable, hence its validities must be r.e., but no recursive axiomatization is known. Also, note that APAL\(^+\) is still very weak, in that it quantifies only over positive epistemic announcements, thus not allowing public announcements of ignorance, which are precisely the ones driving the solution process in puzzles such as the Muddy Children.
- 3.
This means that from any proof of a theorem from the axioms that uses the infinitary rule we can obtain a finitary proof of the same theorem, by using the finitary rule instead.
- 4.
Here, by ‘strong’ version we mean one that allows quantification over a sufficiently wide range of announcements (sufficiently wide to avoid Liar-like circles) as intended by a similar restriction in the original APAL or in its group-restricted version GAL.
- 5.
From an epistemic point of view, it would be more natural to replace U by an operator Ck that describes current common knowledge and quantifies only over currently possible states that are accessible by epistemic chains from the actual state. We chose to stick with U for simplicity and leave the addition of Ck to APAL for future work.
- 6.
This restriction is necessary to produce a well-defined semantics that avoids Liar-like vicious circles. In standard APAL, the restriction is w.r.t. inductive construct \(\Diamond \varphi \). Thus, formulas of the form \(\langle \Diamond p\rangle \varphi \) are allowed in original APAL. APAL and APALM expressivities seem to be incomparable, and that would still be the case if we dropped the above restriction.
- 7.
We use a slightly different version of this rule, which is easily seen to be equivalent to the original version in the presence of the usual PAL reduction axioms.
- 8.
Cheryl’s Birthday problem was part of the 2015 Singapore and Asian Schools Math Olympiad, and became viral after it was posted on Facebook by Singapore TV presenter Kenneth Kong.
- 9.
As a consequence, having such a rich memory of history would destroy some of the appealing features of the APAL operator (e.g. its S4 character: \(\square \varphi \rightarrow \square \square \varphi \)), and would force us to distinguish between “knowability via one communication step” \(\Diamond K\) versus “knowability via a finite communication sequence” \(\Diamond ^* K\), leading to an unnecessarily complex logic.
- 10.
In such models, only the ‘prior’ and the ‘posterior’ information states are taken to be relevant, while all the intermediary steps are forgotten. As a consequence, all the evidence gathered in between the initial and the current state can be compressed into one set E, called “the evidence” (rather than keeping a growing tail-sequence of all past evidence sets). Similarly, in our logic, all the past communication is compressed in its end-result, namely in the set W of current possibilities, which plays the same role as the evidence set E in Bayesian models.
- 11.
Moreover, this limited form of memory is enough to ‘simulate’ the yesterday operator \(Y\varphi \) by using context-dependent formulas. For instance, the dialogue in Cheryl’s birthday puzzle (Albert: “I don’t know when Cheryl’s birthday is, but I know that Bernard doesn’t know it either”; Bernard: “At first I didn’t know when Cheryl’s birthday is, but I know now”; Albert: “Now I also know”), can be simulated by the following sequence of announcements: first, the formula \(0\wedge \lnot K_a c\wedge K_a\lnot K_b c\) is announced (where 0 marks the fact that this is the first announcement), then \((\lnot K_b c)^0 \wedge K_b c\) is announced, and finally \(K_a c\) is announced. (Here, we encode e.g. ‘Albert knows Cheryl’s birthday’ as \(K_a c=\bigvee \{K_a(d\wedge m): d\in D, m\in M\}\), where D is the set of possible days and M is the set of possible months.).
- 12.
In SSL, the set of admissible sets is sometimes, but not always, taken to be a topology. Here, it will be a Boolean algebra with epistemic operators.
- 13.
The update operator \(\langle \theta \rangle \varphi \) is often denoted by \(\langle !\theta \rangle \varphi \) in Public Announcement Logic literature; we skip the exclamation sign, but we will use the notation \(\langle !\rangle \) for this modality and [!] for its dual when we do not want to specify the announcement formula \(\theta \) (so that ! functions as a placeholder for the content of the announcement).
- 14.
The standard notion requires only that formulas are more complex than their subformulas, while we also need that \(\Diamond \varphi \) is more complex than \(\langle \theta \rangle \varphi \). To the best of our knowledge, such a complexity measure was first introduced in [3] for the original APAL language from [2]. Similar measures have later been introduced for topological versions of APAL in [22, 23].
- 15.
The “freshness” of the variable \(p\in P\) in the rule \([!]\square \)-intro ensures that it represents any ‘generic’ announcement.
- 16.
A more direct soundness proof on APALM models is in principle possible, but would require at least as much work as our detour. Unlike in standard EL, PAL or DEL, the meaning of an APALM formula depends, not only on the valuation of the atoms occurring in it, but also on the family \(\mathcal {A}\) of all sets definable by \(\mathcal {L}_{-\Diamond }\)-formulas. The move from models to pseudo-models makes explicit this dependence on the family \(\mathcal {A}\), while also relaxing the demands on \(\mathcal {A}\) (which is no longer required to be exactly the family of \(\mathcal {L}_{-\Diamond }\)-definable sets), and thus makes the soundness proof both simpler and more transparent. Since we will need pseudo-models for our completeness proof anyway, we see no added value in trying to give a more direct proof.
- 17.
A total bisimulation between epistemic models \((W, \sim _1, \ldots , \sim _n, \Vert \cdot \Vert )\) and \((W', \sim '_1, \ldots , \sim '_n, \Vert \cdot \Vert ')\) is an epistemic bisimulation relation (satisfying the usual valuation and back-and-forth conditions from Modal Logic) \(B\subseteq W \times W'\), such that: for every \(s\in W\) there exists some \(s'\in W'\) with \(s B s'\); and dually, for every \(s'\in W'\) there exists some \(s\in W\) with \(s B s'\).
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We thank the anonymous WOLLIC referees for their extremely valuable comments on a previous draft of this paper.
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Baltag, A., Özgün, A., Vargas Sandoval, A.L. (2018). APAL with Memory Is Better. In: Moss, L., de Queiroz, R., Martinez, M. (eds) Logic, Language, Information, and Computation. WoLLIC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10944. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-57669-4_6
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