Re: Thesis project... long winded.

[Nelson Minar]

"John Eikenberry [MSAI]" <address@hidden> wrote:
>I found myself thinking about the possibilities of what it would
>be like if this thechnology really took off. That thousands of these
>little guys would be wandering around various networks, interacting,
>communicating, etc. Seems like it could be considered a complex system 
>(humour me ;). 

I believe you! Thousands of interacting agents (potentially mobile) is
what I'm trying to work on for my graduate research. I'm trying to
figure out exactly how to attack this area now. (BTW, I prefer the
term "mobile agents").

>The network roaming variety has several experimental implementaions
>already, notable example would include the Tocoma project, the
>Penguin perl module and the Agent TCL project.

And IBM aglets (Java) http://www.trl.ibm.co.jp/aglets/
You should also read the old Telescript white papers. They've been
miserable at actually deploying their technology, but they've got a
lot of the ideas right.

>Now, if I were going to make a bunch of agents to do things for
>me, the first thing I would do is consider what metaphor would I use to
>model their behaviours, communications, etc.

The metaphor for lots of software agents I came to the Media Lab with
was artificial life. I tell people that I used to work on simulating
alife and now I want to create real artificial life on the Internet.
There's a lot of value in ecological metaphor, especially when you
think about hostile agent interactions (predators, viruses, etc).

Another metaphor I've come across since being here is economics. In
particular, Mark Miller's papers on Agoric Computing from a few years
ago are really worth reading. They're online at
  http://www.agorics.com/agorpapers.html

As for simulating systems of thousands of mobile agents, well, I have
to wonder if that's a bit premature. What do you want the agents to
do? What is the content of their interactions? Those are my first
questions. Once you answer those, then actually building a system
(either a Swarm simulation or a deployed thing) is the next step.