Logic and the Simulation of Interaction and Reasoning 2 (LSIR2)

In the past years, logicians have become more and more interested in the phenomenon of interaction. The area logic and games deals with the transition from the static logical paradigm of formal proof and derivation to the dynamic world of intelligent interaction and its logical models. The research training site GLoRiClass, the main financial sponsor of this workshop, is one of the examples of this type of research.

While these interactive aspects are relatively new to logicians, on a rather different level, modelling intelligent interaction has been an aspect of the practical work of computer game designers for a long time. Pragmatic questions such as 'What makes a storyline interesting', 'What makes an reaction natural', and 'What role do emotions play in game decisions' have been tackled by practicing programmers. The practical aspects of computer gaming reach out to a wide interdisciplinary field including psychology and cognitive science. So far, there are only a few cross-links between these two communities.

When the need for a venue to connect the research in logic and games with the more applied research on stories, games and simulation of behaviour was recognized, the research training site GLoRiClass decided to organize a workshop Logic and the Simulation of Interaction and Reasoning (LSIR1) at the AISB Convention in Aberdeen in April 2008. The general sentiment of participants of LSIR1 was that such a workshop should be repeated, possibly with more focus, enabling directed efforts for new research projects.

LSIR2 is the successor of the mentioned Aberdeen workshop and will be held at IJCAI 2009, concretely focussing on the relation between modern techniques in logic (such as discourse representation theory or dynamic epistemic logic) and concrete modelling problems in computer games (either as part of the story or game design or as part of the design of the artificial agents).

We aim combining communities of logic, multi-agent systems, computer game design, and the story understanding community. This aim will be reflected in the list of the four keynote speakers and should also be visible from the selected submissions.