Multi agent problem solving with mental states

The mental state S of an agent A refers to the state of an agent described using attributes such as beliefs, intentions, commitments, capabilities, plan, etc. We argue that attributes of mental states should not only correspond to their commonsense counterparts as suggested in (Shoham, 1993), but also that their semantics be mutually understood by all the agents the agent A is likely to interact with. Mutual understanding or agreement involves infinitely recursive beliefs, and we propose that, for action performing agents, they need to be truncated at a finite depth and supported with explicit assumptions and inference rules resulting in actions on the world. We also propose that an intelligent agent must also have apt attribute called awareness, which like mutual beliefs, is infinitely recursive, and for practical reasoning purposes must be truncated. We propose a mental structure of an agent as a hierarchy of knowledge structures Kn, kn-1, ..., K0, where Ki implements the abstract mental substate Si. We finally work out an example discussing the role played by a few selected mental attributes such as intention, commitment, etc, and make suggestions for future work