Thursday 29 May 2008

JADE - Behaviour Scheduling and Execution

"An agent can execute several behaviours concurrently. However, it is important to note that the scheduling of behaviours in an agent is not pre-emptive (as for Java threads), but cooperative. This means that when a behaviour is scheduled for exection its action() method is called and runs until it returns. Therefore it is the programmer who defines when an agent switches from the execution of one behaviour to the execution to another."

(Source: developing multi-agent systems with JADE)

Monday 19 May 2008

AAMAS 2008

Just got back from a week in Portugal attending the 'Seventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems' (AAMAS 2008). It was good to meet in person individuals whose work I have been following this past year-and-a-half. On the back of the conference and given that my focus is Argumentative Negotiation in Multiagent Systems, I find myself quite interested in the work of Iyad Rahwan (strategy etc), Peter Mcburney (dialogue games etc) and Elizabeth Black (enthymemes etc).

Thursday 8 May 2008

43.2, MAS: Rational Decision Making and Negotiation

Snippets taken from slides prepared and used by Ulle Endriss to teach a "Multiagent Systems: Rational Decision Making and Negotiation" course at Imperial College London in 2005

Game Theory: Given the rules of the "game" (the negotiation mechanism, the protocol), what strategy should a rational agent adopt?

Dominant Strategies: A strategy is called dominant iff, independently of what any of the other agents do, following that strategy will result in a larger payoff than any other strategy.

Nash Equilibria: A Nash equilibrium is a set of strategies, one for each agent, such that no agent could improve its payoff by unilaterally deviating from their assigned strategy.

Monday 5 May 2008

43.1, MAS: Rational Decision Making and Negotiation

Snippets taken from slides prepared and used by Ulle Endriss to teach a "Multiagent Systems: Rational Decision Making and Negotiation" course at Imperial College London in 2005

Welfare Economics: mathematical models of how the distribution of resources amongst agents affects social welfare.

Social Welfare: Utilitarian, Egalitarian, Nash Product, Pareto Optimality.

Thursday 1 May 2008

More questions to think about

Following on from the previous post, a couple of questions to think about:

Why negotiation rather than an auction-based approach?

Why argumentative negotiation rather than a bargaining approach?