Treating dialogue as a game

One way to solve the problem of these different perspectives of the plan is to view the outcome of the dialogue as a sequence of acts, where at each turn, the perspective of the acting agent is taken. The acting agent's beliefs about the plan rules and the enablement of preconditions should be used to generate the set of available acts that can be taken at the turn. These acts should be the first steps in the plan structures that correspond with the beliefs. Since there can be many permissible sequences of acts due to the many alternative acts at each turn, an appropriate representation of the dialogue possibilities would be a game tree, whose nodes are constructed from the alternating perspectives of the agents participating in the dialogue. The game tree is not really a plan, but rather a representation of the possible outcomes of the iterated process whose steps consist of plan recognition, planning of the first step in the continuation of the recognised plan, and execution of that step. This process is symmetric, and alternates between the two agents. It can therefore be used by the agent to represent an expectation of the ultimate outcome of each of the alternative acts that it can choose from at the current turn. For an agent to generate a game tree, it must plan forward by alternately using its level 1 beliefs, and its level 2 beliefs, since these provide the expectation of its own act and its expectation of the other agent at each turn.