Over the past 30 years Artificial Intelligence has fragmented from one broad subject into a cluster of narrow but deep individual disciplines. During this time we have also seen the development of increasingly complex software systems for application domains such as robot control, mobile computing, and expert system interfaces. Many of these designs use elements from the branches of AI, but pay...

The example of the ‘‘absent-minded driver’’ was introduced by Piccione and Rubinstein in the context of games and decision problems with imperfect recall. They claim that a ‘‘paradox’’ or ‘‘inconsistency’’ arises when the decision reached at the ‘‘planning stage’’ is compared with that at the ‘‘action stage.’’ Though the example is provocative and worth having, their analysis is questionable. A...

Game theory has been used to model large-scale social events—such constitutional law, democratic stability, standard setting, gender roles, social movements, communication, markets, the selection of officials by means of elections, coalition formation, resource allocation, distribution of goods, and war—as the aggregate result of individual choices in interdependent decision-making. Game theory...

1. ON HAVING A MIND How simple minded can you be? Many philosophers would answer: no more simple than a language-using human being. Many other philosophers, and most cognitive scientists, would allow that mammals, and perhaps birds, possess minds. But few have gone to the extreme of believing that very simple organisms, such as insects, can be genuinely minded. This is the ground that the prese...