last update 2015-03-27
News
Lectures
Exercises
Assignments
There are three sets of assignments.
Passing all three assignments adds 0.5 bonus points to the mark of your exam;
two of three adds 0.3, and one of three adds 0.1.
You can hand in your assignment in Hendriks' mailbox in the CS staff room on the 4th floor,
or by sending it to
r.d.a.hendriks@vu.nl.
Make sure your document is a single pdf,
and, in case of a scan, make sure it is readable!
- assignment 1 (deadline Friday 13/2) (answers)
- assignment 2 (deadline Monday 2/3) (answers)
- assignment 3 (deadline Monday 16/3) (answers)
Lecturer
- Dimitri Hendriks
- r.d.a.hendriks@vu.nl
- 020 598 7736
- room T429 of the W&N building
What to study for the exam?
The exam will be on the topics treated in the lectures, see the slides.
A good indication for the type of questions you can expect on the exam are
the exercises, the assignments, and previous exams.
Below you find a list of chapters from the book
that partly cover the lectures.
These chapters also contain things not discussed in the lectures,
and which will not be examined, as indicated per chapter.
Nonetheless these parts are interesting to read and
may support your understanding of the other parts.
- Chapter 2.
- Chapter 3.
- Chapter 4, except 4.5.
(you do not have to be able to reproduce a proof of decidability of satisfiability.) - Chapter 9, except 9.4 (but can be useful) and 9.5.
(frame correspondence (the modal definability/characterizability of frame properties), has been a recurring theme in the lectures) - Chapter 18, except 18.3, 18.4, 18.5, 18.6. Temporal logic is more extensively treated in Venema's Temporal Logic.
- Chapter 14, except 14.6, 14.7, 14.8, 14.9.
- Chapter 5, except 5.8 and 5.9.
(you should be able to use completeness theorems, but their proofs are beyond the scope of this course.) - Chapter 12, except 12.4.
Course content
A thorough introduction to modal logics,
and its applications in computer science and artificial intelligence.
We will select some themes from the book:
basic modal logic and possible world semantics,
bisimulation and invariance,
modal definability, decidability, ...
In particular we treat the modal logics most relevant to computer science and AI:
temporal (LTL and CTL), dynamic (PDL) and epistemic logic.
Course reading
Johan van Benthem, Modal Logics for Open Minds, CSLI Publications, 2010.
Entry requirements
The bachelor course Logic and Modelling,
or an equivalent introduction to first-order logic.
Target group
Master students Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems.
Schedule
The course takes seven weeks of teaching,
(Monday, February 2 - Thursday, March 19),
see also vurooster.
- Lectures:
- Monday, 15:30 - 17:15, room S655.
- Wednesday, 13:30 - 15:15, room C659.
- Exercise Classes:
- Thursday, 15:30 - 17:15, room F637.
- Exam:
- Wednesday, March 25, 2015, 15:15 - 18:00, room HG-08A00.
Further reading
- M. Huth and M. Ryan, Logic in Computer Science: Modelling and Reasoning about Systems, Cambridge University Press, 2000
- S. Popkorn, First Steps in Modal Logic. Cambridge University Press, 1994
- P. Blackburn, M. de Rijke and Y. Venema, Modal Logic. Cambridge University Press, Theoretical Tracts in Computer Science, 2001.
- P. Blackburn, J. van Benthem, F. Wolter (eds.). Handbook of Modal Logic. Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2006.
- Temporal Logic, by Yde Venema, Chapter 10 in: L. Goble (editor), The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic, Blackwell Publishers, Malden, USA, 2001, pages 203 - 223.
Links
- The website of the book Modal Logic for Open Minds.
- An article on the origins of modal logic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Another entry for modal logic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Entry in Wikipedia. See also Kripke semantics.
- Advances in Modal Logic.
Previous exams (in dutch until 2010)