AI Advances 8
Nate Truitt writes "Research published in the journal "Artificial Life" reveals that autonomous agents -- software entities capable of independent action in dynamic, unpredictable environments -- can communicate with one another as they work to achieve a common goal. They actually develop a language of sorts...." It doesn't look like the paper is available yet, but I know that Giles has been willing to send copies by email of his other papers.
communicating in their own language? hmmm.... (Score:2)
Want to play too? (Score:1)
It's got Code!!!
like ants??? (Score:2)
Hmm... so agents in 2-d were able to communicate to locate another 'prey' agent.
Could this be applied to something like gnutella, where agents live on the n-dimesional grid of the gnutella world, with each server having hosting a 'message board' where agents that know about one another communicate? The prey would be a specific search, be it keyword or filename.
Since these agents were supposedly able to create a language that used words with contextual meanings, would that allow for search in-context?
Ok, perhaps a bit of a stretch, but it does make sense that searches of distrubeted networks are going to have to use some sort of searching agent.
Ants use something like this. When many ants are being succesful at a certain task, more ants do that task... i.e. if food is plentiful, ants coming back from foraging indicate to other atns that their search was succesful. After enough messages like this, an ant will shift gears.
Not the first.... (Score:1)
In Novemeber and October of 1989, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) was called in to contain an outbreak of Ebola at a monkey-handling facility in Reston, Virginia.
Several workers at the facility were exposed to animals infected with Ebola. However, none of the workers showed any symptoms associated with Ebola (i.e. they didn't keel over and die). At this time it is known whether the strain of Ebola they were infected with, named Ebola Reston, is fatal to humans.
For a good read, check out The Hot Zone [amazon.com] by Richard Preston.
Re:Not the first.... (Score:1)
Re:Not the first.... (Score:1)
Re:Not the first.... (Score:1)
It's rather less of a "keel over and die" disease and more of a "disintegrate internally whilst most of your bodily fluids flee through any and all available orifices" disease.
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Done in `97 by a high-school student (Score:1)
I judged a science fair in Hilo, Hawaii in 1997 that had an entry that demonstrated something almost identical. The 1st place entry was by a student named Ben Schmidel [hmc.edu], whose topic was "Virtual Mating: An Exploration In Artificial Communication".
His project was hotly debated amongst the judges by those "in the know" and some "science" teachers who would have been better off as assistant gym teachers. In the end, Ben also went on to win first prize in the state fair. It was actually a very interesting and thought-provoking project, especially for a high school student. I'm not quite sure what he's up to now.
If he didn't play any role in the research mentioned in the article, it is yet another example of parallel evolution. (or maybe an obvious progression of ideas) Either way, i'll remember Ben as "the guy who did it first".