Cheating husbands and other stories: A case study of knowledge, action, and communication

The relationship between knowledge and action is a fundamental one: a processor in a computer network (or a robot or a person, for that matter) should base its actions on the knowledge (or information) it has. One of the main uses of communication is passing around information that may eventually be required by the receiver in order to decide upon subsequent actions. Understanding the relationship between knowledge, action, and communication is fundamental to the design of computer network protocols, intelligent robots, etc. By looking at a number of variants of the cheating husbands puzzle, we illustrate the subtle relationship between knowledge, communication, and action in a distributed environment.