Dynamic Epistemic Semantics and the Surprise Exam. In this talk, I will briefly present the dynamic semantics that I developed in my dissertation. This is a semantics for a language that is a combination of multi-agent epistemic logic and propositional dynamic logic with programs that express information change of agents. This may seem an unwelcome property of the semantics, but I will show that it is exactly this fact that makes it possible to throw new light on certain puzzles that involve reasoning about information, such as the puzzle of the dirty children and the puzzle of the surprise exam. Dynamo implements an executable process interpretation of DPL augmented with constructs for bounded iteration and bounded choice.
Dynamo programs have a purely declarative dynamic semantics.
There are no side effects, and no control features. Dynamo is pure dynamic logic, yet a remarkably versatile tool for handling problems of search and bounded iteration. Please visit the Dynamo homepage for further information. We present a tableaux-based model generation calculus for DRT, which gives us an incremental approach to discourse processing in the presence of world knowledge. We show the usefulness of such as system for several discourse phenomena.