Re: Organization Self-Design

[cgl]

Thomas A Ottaway writes:

> I would like to model several forms of organizational self-desig.  I would
> like to have an agent, under predetermined conditions, decompose into two
> or more agents, complete their respective subtasks, and then recombine.
> Esentially, I want to repeat some work done by Ishida, Yokoo, and Gasser
> for different purposes.  Can Swarm handle this type of
> decomposition/composition of agents.  Thanks for any assistance.

  This is one of the reasons we made Swarm capable of hierarchical
composition (or decomposition), and this is a good case where you 
might use that capability....

  Keep in mind that a swarm is also an object, hence an agent-object
in one swarm can itself be a swarm. Since it is an object, it
can have methods that it executes just like any other agent-object,
however, since it is also a swarm, some of those methods can
invoke a schedule over its own collection of agents. Thus, you
can have the agent-object act like a single agent at some times,
but as a collection of agents at other times.

Chris Langton


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