Tessella Work Placement

I am starting a one-month work placement at Tessella tomorrow. I will be based at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory working under Nicholas Draper on the Mantid project. The Mantid project is described as follows: "The Mantid project provides a platform that supports high-performance computing on neutron and muon data."

64-67, References from Master's Project Report

References from my Master's Project Report that I keep forgetting to Blog!...

64, A simple procedure for finding equitable allocations of indivisible goods, by Dorothea Herreiner & Clemens Puppe, 2000.

65, Issues in Multiagent Resource Allocation, by Yann Chevaleyre et al, 2006.

66, The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver, by Reid G. Smith, 1980.

67, A task-swap negotiation protocol based on the contract net paradigm, by Matteo Golfarelli, Dario Maio & Stefano Rizzi, 1997.

Deadlock in Implementation

After quite a few days debugging finally spotted the problem...

Consider the following case:

1) a1 initiates a proposal with a3 and a4.
2) a2 initiates the same proposal with a3 and a4.
3) a3 responds to a1 with acceptance.
4) a4 responds to a2 with acceptance.

In this situation a3 cannot respond to a2 and a4 cannot respond to a1. Both are stuck.

Now need to think what to do about it!

Assumptions as contraries of assumptions

I wanted the desirable property of not allowing two conflicting assumptions to hold simultaneously and thus added conflicting assumptions to the set of contraries for each assumption, e.g. asmHas(X,R) is set as a contrary of asmNotHas(X,R) and vice versa.

This introduces a couple of problems though:
(1) The defences of arguments get really large since there are now so many more attacks to consider/counter.
(2) Incorrectness! e.g. the contrary of asmHas(a2,r5) is notHas(a2,r5) supported by asmNotHas(a2,r5), but asmHas(a2,r5) counter-attacks asmNotHas(a2,r5) so the initial attack doesn't hold (wrongly).

I have commented out for now (in the implementation) assumptions as contraries of assumptions.

IBM - the smarter city

Awesome resource for those into information, technology and governance. So exciting no? Or maybe it's just me :(

Split into six sections as follows: Transportation, Public Safety, Energy & Utilities, Education, Healthcare and Development. Would be an exercise to think how my PhD research could tie into some of these.

"Welcome to the smarter city. A collection of smart ideas happening in cities all over the world today..."

"The time to make our city smarter is now. But how do you keep traffic flowing, cure healthcare systems, protect citizens while protecting their privacy? How do you demonstrate one decision affecting millions of people? And involve them in making their city a better place to live?"

http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/#/home/

Signalling and Signalling Games

Just did a bit of reading on the class of Game Theory games termed 'Signalling Games' and the Economics and Evolutionary Biology theories of 'Signalling'.

68-69, Coloured Trails (CT) game

Looked through a couple of papers describing and running experiments using the Coloured Trails (CT) game for multi-agent resource negotiation:

68, The Influence of Social Dependencies on Decision-Making: Initial Investigations with a New Game, by Barbara J. Grosz, Sarit Kraus & Shavit Talman, 2004.

69, The Effects of Goal Revelation on Computer-Mediated Negotiation, by Ya'akov Gal et al, 2009.

Implementation referenced in [69] can be found here:
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/ai/ct