One Hundred Prisoners and a Lightbulb - Logic and Computation

This is a case-study in knowledge representation. We analyze the ‘one hundred prisoners and a lightbulb’ puzzle. In this puzzle it is relevant what the agents (prisoners) know, how their knowledge changes due to observations, and how they affect the state of the world by changing facts, i.e., by their actions. These actions depend on the history of previous actions and observations. Part of its interest is that all actions are local, i.e. not publicly observable, and part the problem is therefore how to disseminate local results to other agents, and make them global. The various solutions to the puzzle are presented as protocols (interated functions from agent’s local states, and histories of actions, to actions). The computational aspect is about average runtime termination under conditions of random (‘fair’) scheduling. The paper consists of three parts. First, we present different versions of the puzzle, and their solution. This includes a probabilistic version, and a ver...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: KR
• Authors: Hans P. van Ditmarsch, Jan van Eijck, William Wu
• Keywords: Automated Reasoning, Epistemic Logic, Faster Expected Termination, KR 2010, Puzzle