Saturday 19 April 2008

Jason - note to self 4

Agent programming is intrinsically concurrent: Agents and the environment, unless otherwise specified, run asynchronously, so various executions of some given code are possible. The different executions represent different interleavings of the executions of the threads of each of the agents, which is determined by the operating system scheduling. With 2 processors (or in a distributed network), the possibilities increase further.

Summing up, the asynchronous execution and the way events are produced by Belief Update Function lead to very different executions. This however corresponds to "real life". In case a more detailed control is required, the execution should be synchronised. This can be done by the "synchronous" execution mode.

It is worth reading up on concurrency and threads. A good Distributed Systems book should suffice.

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