Thomas Ågotnes

h-index24
2papers
1,736citations

2 Papers

1.2LOApr 17, 2025
Anonymous Public Announcements

Thomas Ågotnes, Rustam Galimullin, Ken Satoh et al.

We formalise the notion of an anonymous public announcement in the tradition of public announcement logic. Such announcements can be seen as in-between a public announcement from ``the outside" (an announcement of $φ$) and a public announcement by one of the agents (an announcement of $K_aφ$): we get more information than just $φ$, but not (necessarily) about exactly who made it. Even if such an announcement is prima facie anonymous, depending on the background knowledge of the agents it might reveal the identity of the announcer: if I post something on a message board, the information might reveal who I am even if I don't sign my name. Furthermore, like in the Russian Cards puzzle, if we assume that the announcer's intention was to stay anonymous, that in fact might reveal more information. In this paper we first look at the case when no assumption about intentions are made, in which case the logic with an anonymous public announcement operator is reducible to epistemic logic. We then look at the case when we assume common knowledge of the intention to stay anonymous, which is both more complex and more interesting: in several ways it boils down to the notion of a ``safe" announcement (again, similarly to Russian Cards). Main results include formal expressivity results and axiomatic completeness for key logical languages.

6.3AIJun 27, 2016
True Lies

Thomas Ågotnes, Hans van Ditmarsch, Yanjing Wang

A true lie is a lie that becomes true when announced. In a logic of announcements, where the announcing agent is not modelled, a true lie is a formula (that is false and) that becomes true when announced. We investigate true lies and other types of interaction between announced formulas, their preconditions and their postconditions, in the setting of Gerbrandy's logic of believed announcements, wherein agents may have or obtain incorrect beliefs. Our results are on the satisfiability and validity of instantiations of these semantically defined categories, on iterated announcements, including arbitrarily often iterated announcements, and on syntactic characterization. We close with results for iterated announcements in the logic of knowledge (instead of belief), and for lying as private announcements (instead of public announcements) to different agents. Detailed examples illustrate our lying concepts.