Re: Another interesting issue ....

[Vladimir Jojic]

On Sat, 17 May 1997, Mark P. Line wrote:

> Vladimir Jojic wrote:
> > 
> > I will describe a simple distributed Swarm system, just to start the
> > discussion about this.
> > 
> > Description:
> > ------------
> > 
> > Let's consider a system of ~1000 autonomous agents. For example. user has
> > 11 PCs on a local net with i586 in each of those PCs (all machines are
> > equal in the terms of the processing power).
> 
> Local net? How about if you define a TCP port for "Distributed Swarm"
> and run the whole thing on an intranet or on the Internet?

Actually it is the same thing, under Unix, sockets act the same way if
machine that you are communicating with is in the room next to yours, or
on some distant campus ... There are sockets in WinNT, but I am not sure,
if we could utilize them ...

> 
> > 1. Grouping agents (manually, or by intelligent load-balancer) that tend
> > to communicate between them selves a lot (`friends') on the same machine.
> > 2. Creating a map of agents on the other machines (based on information
> > from coordinator from previous interation), so that the coordinator would
> > in time become more-or-less idle.
> 
> As long as you take one or both of these approaches to keep the net load
> down, I think it would be fun to try some distributed Swarming on the
> Internet.

Tierra is already doing this .... as far as I know .... but it's easy for
them they are in genetic algorithms, and GA'a don't interact much ... :)

But for us (swarm users), it is very unlikely, that we will be able to
keep the net load down, simply, because, agents have to interact with each
other, and more importantly the space ...:( so we are limited to the set
of machines that belong to us ... or at least our University ;) 
 
> 
> > Ideally, distributed Swarm, would be useful for the simulation of the
> > large number of the complicated agents (for example based on neural
> > nets), where more resources are spent on the calculating the next move,
> > than talking to other agents and actually making the move (`thinkers' as
> > opposed to the `talkers').
> 
> I would even go so far as to hope that the availability of distributed
> Swarm would encourage modellers to go ahead and put more intelligence
> into their agents -- especially when the agents are supposed to be
> modelling entities they presume in fact to be intelligent.

I started thinking about this concept, because I would like to simulate
human society, and this means, I need a lot of computing power. I am
already trying to use my connections with people in the NCSA at University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to schedule couple of large simulations
... (did anybody read 'Foundation' by Isaac Asimov, there is a mention of
the simulation of the societies, if there are people who read it recently,
please explain the concept here. I read it 6 years ago, and I just can't
find any time to do it again :( 
 
> 
> > 1. Will I really get 10* performance?
> > 
> > Probably not, 5 times better is more likely (but this is still a lot
> > better, hey even 2 times is better!). But in some special cases, you
> > might
> 
> I think performance is just one of several relevant issues. The support
> of certain kinds of collaborative work is another issue that, for me, is
> more important than performance. I wonder how often the low-bandwidth
> partitions might more-or-less (be made to) coincide with reasonable
> divisions of labor within a team of modellers.

English is not my mother tongue, so you will have to explain the last
sentence :) but I agree with the rest of the e-mail :) 

Your last sentence implies some concepts (if I understood it properly) 
from genetic algorithms. Take a look at the Tierra systems (algorithms are
`fighting for survival'). 

Back ti distributed Swar, I had a similar discussion with
Brad Laydorf:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
VJ> You could go even further, and make it possible for agents from world
simulated on your machine, talk to some other agents in some other world
on some machine on the other side of the planet :) 
 
BL> Sounds like a good sci-fi story, someone is living their life, then
some "other being" (or agent) shows up and tells the person that thier
whole life is just a simulation....chilling. 

VJ> Yap, but than that someone could say to that being something like: 
`Hey buddy, guess what?  Segmentation fault!' ... and then, the intruder
vanished into the thin air ... :)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


> -- Mark

++ Vladimir


PS. What happened with simpleExperBug ...  ? 



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