Maintaining mental models of agents who have existential misconceptions

摘要

This work describes methods for using and maintaining models of agents who have existential misconceptions. Existential misconceptions are situations where agents are in disagreement about the existence of objects in some domain of discourse. This paper characterizes existential misconceptions, discusses related literature, and describes how to construct a model of an agent who has an existential misconception. This paper is concerned with two kinds of existential misconception. These are compression-based and dispersion-based. We provide algorithms to test for these existential misconceptions, to describe them, and to correct one kind of existential misconception (dispersion-based). We prove correctness theorems for these algorithms and have implemented them in COMMON LISP.