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Debugging Is Explaining

  • Conference paper
PRIMA 2012: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7455))

Abstract

Debugging is a process of finding and reducing the number of bugs, or defects, in a program. A defect typically is detected because the program generates unexpected behaviour. In order to locate the cause of a defect, it therefore is essential to explain why this behaviour is generated. In this paper, we propose a new debugging approach for agent-oriented programming that exploits the structure and basic concepts that are used in logic-based agent programs for providing answers to some of such why questions. Our approach is based on the fact that the behaviour of an agent-oriented program can be traced back to basically two sources. First, agents derive their choice of action from their beliefs and goals - two fundamental programming concepts in agent-oriented programming. These folk psychological concepts provide reasons for doing something. Second, agent programs are rule-based programs and the evaluation of rules to a large extent determines the program’s behaviour.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

    Koen V. Hindriks

Authors
  1. Koen V. Hindriks
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 54224, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Iyad Rahwan

  2. School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, 2052, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Wayne Wobcke

  3. Tandy School of Computer Science, University of Tulsa, Rayzor Hall, 3155 East 5th Place, 74104, Tulsa, OK, USA

    Sandip Sen

  4. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Waseda University, 3-4-1 Okubo, 169-8555, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan

    Toshiharu Sugawara

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Hindriks, K.V. (2012). Debugging Is Explaining. In: Rahwan, I., Wobcke, W., Sen, S., Sugawara, T. (eds) PRIMA 2012: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems. PRIMA 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7455. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32729-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32729-2_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32728-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32729-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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