Knowledge and Distributed computation

Abstract

Abstract : Understanding systems of agents that interact in some way is fundamental to many areas of science, including philosophy, linguistics, economics, game theory, logic artificial intelligence, robotics, and distributed computing. As we try to understand these systems, we often find ourselves reasoning (at least informally) about the knowledge these agents have about other agents. Recent work has shown that these informal notions of knowledge can be made precise in the context of computer science. In this thesis, we provide convincing evidence that reasoning in terms of knowledge can lead to general, unifying results about distributed computation, and we extend the standard definitions of knowledge and apply them in new contexts such as cryptography. Keywords: Crytography.