thoughts from FOSDEM, status

[Kévin Ottens]

Le Dimanche 20 Mars 2005 06:50, Aaron J. Seigo a écrit :
> i don't see how this isn't equivalent to asking the same question of a
> central store.

Because it's harder to design a central store able to answer any query for any 
domain? Because it's harder to maintain since it introduce a lot of 
complexity?

Just guessing here...

> well, this is one of the _primary_ reasons for having the information not
> encapsulated inside individual applications. the whole concept of
> "information belongs to an application" is broken.

You're maybe right here... I stayed to much on Scott proposal last time we 
discussed it, but we can have an agent/document mapping, agent/author mapping 
etc. That's exactly design decision and what agent engineering is about.

In fact I acted more as an external consultant explaining how it could look 
like with a agent/application mapping. =)

> i also think that if you sit down and draw it out on paper so you can see
> it, you end up with the exact same sort of "central store" only now you've
> spread out the store across multiple applications.

Depends how you distribute too... It's really feasible to have a central store 
with a low level query language, and then agents upon this central store able 
to answer (and collaborate to answer) a higher level query language with more 
semantic.

> and at the end of the day we'd still need a central switchboard to
> coordinate it all. we gain nothing. except a ton of running processes.

Implementation detail... really. It could be achieved using only one process. 
Multi-agents systems are more about how to design the system. Using one 
thread/process per agent is something to decide at the implementation detail.

> i remember when agents were all the rage back in the 90s.

Still the case, it's a very active field...

> lots of research done.

And lots were (are...) not in fact about multi-agent systems. Some people 
simply relable some of their articles with the "agent" term so that it looks 
"hype".

Moreover, please note that there're the multi-agent systems field, and the 
"rational" (not sure of the english word...) agent field... they are really 
different business.

> lots of things tried. nothing particularly useful arose.

Wrong, and wrong...
I've just one example of a system done in my team that works better than 
equivalent centralized (designed) systems (it's one example... it's not the 
case for everything done by the multi-agent community).

Multi-agent systems have some systemic properties you can't find in 
centralized systems.

> i think it's  
> a far too complex way of doing it

Maybe it's because you have difficulties to _think_ distributed. But honestly 
when you become used to it, it's sometimes easier to think distributed... At 
the start I admit it's more natural to try to keep the control centralized 
etc.

> and it simply limits the possibilities. 

I don't understand how it could limit the possibilities... It's just another 
paradigm of designing, higher level than object oriented design, and even 
compatible with the object oriented paradigm (most multi-agent systems 
nowaday have both agents and passive objects manipulated by those agents).

On the other hand I'm not pushing the use of multi-agent systems at all. =)
It's just that not everything as been said... and that I disagree with some 
Aaron points. ;-)

Regards.
-- 
Kévin 'ervin' Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net
"Ni le maître sans disciple, Ni le disciple sans maître,
Ne font reculer l'ignorance."