PhD application

As well as the patient-appointments scenario which I have, i.e. making as many patients as possible happy with their allocated appointment, another one could be to give as many employees as possible a task which they like (or a task which is within their capacity perhaps).

74, Argumentative Alternating Offers

Good paper ('Argumentative Alternating Offers', Nabila Hadidi, Yannis Dimopolous, Pavlos Moraitis, 2010). Understandable. Always a good positive feeling understanding a paper!

Paper is about introducing argumentation to the "alternating offers (negotiation) protocol" and separating (making a distinction) between "practical" and "epistemic" arguments. Worth nothing that the work is for the 2-agent setting and arguments are treated as abstract entities.

A few questions to ask of the author(s):

• Are (would) the conflict relations (Re and Rp) (be) shared by both agents? (see page 442)
• Are (would) the preference relations (>=p and >=e) (be) shared by both agents? (see page 442)
• Why is the assumption on page 443 that all practical arguments are 'useful' for some offer necessary?
• The 'reject' case on page 445 (and explained on page 447): Why is it so? What does it mean for arguments and offers to be removed from the agent's theory?
• Are offers ever added to the agents known offers (i.e. is it dynamic or static)?

73, Opportunistic Belief Reconciliation During Distributed Interactions

Tried reading this paper ('Opportunistic Belief Reconciliation During Distributed Interactions', Paul Martin, David Robertson, Michael Rovatsos, 2010) but couldn't understand why and what it is. Seems kind of related to my AABA paper.

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.