Environments for Multi-Agent Systems

The modern ?eld of multiagent systems has developed from two main lines of earlier research. Its practitioners generally regard it as a form of arti?cial intelligence (AI). Some of its earliest work was reported in a series of workshops in the US dating from1980,revealinglyentitled,“Distributed ArtificialIntelligence,” and pioneers often quoted a statement attributed to Nils Nilsson that “all AI is distributed.” The locus of classical AI was what happens in the head of a single agent, and much MAS research reflects this heritage with its emphasis on detailed modeling of the mental state and processes of individual agents. From this perspective, intelligence is ultimately the purview of a single mind, though it can be amplified by appropriate interactions with other minds. These interactions are typically mediated by structured protocols of various sorts, modelled on human conventional behaviour. But the modern field of MAS was not born of a single parent. A few researchers have persistently advocated ideas from the field of artificial life (ALife). These scientists were impressed by the complex adaptive behaviours of communities of animals (often extremely simple animals, such as insects or even microorganisms). The computational models on which they drew were often created by biologists who used them not to solve practical engineering problems but to test their hypotheses about the mechanisms used by natural systems. In the artificial life model, intelligence need not reside in a single agent, but emerges at the level of the community from the nonlinear interactions among agents. Because the individual agents are often subcognitive, their interactions cannot be modelled by protocols that presume linguistic competence.

origin event

 E4MAS 2004

journal or series

 Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)

container publication for

 Environment-Based Coordination Through Coordination Artifacts (paper in proceedings, 2005) — Alessandro Ricci, Mirko Viroli, Andrea Omicini

 “Exhibitionists” and “Voyeurs” do it better: A Shared Environment Approach for Flexible Coordination with Tacit Messages (paper in proceedings, 2005) — Luca Tummolini, Cristiano Castelfranchi, Alessandro Ricci, Mirko Viroli, Andrea Omicini