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Simon Wells
Simon Wells

Simon Wells is an academic researching Argumentation Theory, Automated Reasoning, Intelligent Agents (IA) and MultiAgent Systems (MAS) all approached through a ludic lens.

He is particularly interested in how these tools can be usefully applied to critical literacy, security, gamification, and complex systems.

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2011 (12)
2010 (27)
2009 (3)
 

Dundee Students @ Yahoo! HackDay

We (meaning Andy) have run a successful Yahoo! HackDay at Dundee for the last couple of years. This year some of our students went down to the Yahoo! OpenHack event in Londidium to present their own hack: IntelliSearch, for which they won Best Mozilla Hack. Anyhow, two of the three students who developed IntelliSearch, Laurence & Chris, have been working in their spare time, on a multiplayer online game called Zandrok. Anyhow, yesterday I met with Chris to discuss his fourth year project which will use software agents in relation to Zandrok. More information will be forthcoming once we iron out what exactly we plan to achieve, but it should be an exciting project. In the meantime, here is the IntelliSeach presentation:

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Strategy Versus Tactics

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I found a really interesting comment over on Charlie's blog about the effect of technological change on the exercise of control. This comment in turn lead me to The Rules of the Game by Andrew Gordon, a work on naval history which tells the story of the 1916 battle of Jutland. The comment that interested me talked about how the introduction of steam powered ships into the Royal Navy, and therefore the increased control over those ships which were no longer slaves to the wind and many other factors, meant that where previously responsibility and authority for any given ship lay with the captains of individual vessels, this role was increasingly taken on by the admiral of the fleet who could precisely order the position and speed of ships under his command. This lead to less initiative on the part of individual vessels and had a deleterious effect on the competence of crews and independence of thought of their captains. The upshot was increased centralised but essentially illusory control over the fleet to the detriment of the military effectiveness of the fleet. To some degree this is an issue of strategy, as devised by the admiral, versus tactics, of individual captains trying to achieve goals within that strategy. If too much of the tactical role is assumed by the admiral on top of the strategic role, then the control structure of the fleet is brittle. This is fine if the initiative of individual captains is not impacted because they can resume control should the middle not hold. However, should individual initiative be lost then this can leave the fleet without even decentralised control should the communications and instructions from the admiral be lost. Clearly there is balance that need to be found between centralised control, steering the overall fleet in a desirable direction, and the initiative and intelligent behaviour of individual entities within the fleet. There are distinct parallels between this scenario and the kinds of problems that I am interested in tackling using multiagent systems. Much of computing has traditionally focussed on very centralised control over the elements of a system. Whilst I am sure there is some form of turing-type equivalence between centralised and decentralised solutions to problems, I am also sure that certain problems can be more easily, or more robustly, tackled using decentralised techniques of which software systems comprised of multiple, autonomous intelligent agents.
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Against Optimality...

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Recently I have become interested in how intelligent agents, multiagent systems, and defeasible reasoning can be applied to complex, real-world problems to reveal practically useful and justifiable solutions. This is as opposed to searching for optimal solutions which, whilst definitely interesting, often have drawbacks when applied in the real-world. To my mind, one aspect of intelligent behaviour is that we don't generally search continuously for the optimal solution to our problems but just for a solution that fits our goals, or at least some sort of preference-ordered subset of our goals. Any solution that gets us some of the way towards our goals is generally more acceptable than no solution at all, or the perfect solution that comes too late. It is this kind of real-world reasoning and problem solving that I am interested in, both from a theoretical perspective when I look at models of defeasible human reasoning, and from a practical perspective when I look at real-world problems and attempt to produce software that helps us to robustly tackle those problems. Why multi-agent systems? Because I think that they offer a very good approach to architecting robust, flexible, large-scale, distributed, intelligent software systems which incorporate the interests of multiple-stakeholders and that can be maintained and extended with relative ease. MAS can therefore be likened to a methodology for tackling certain kinds of problem. The nature of these problems has long been recognised:
"What has happened is that we’re beginning to lose our innocence, or naiveté, about how the world works. As we begin to understand complex systems, we begin to understand that we’re part of an ever-changing, interlocking, nonlinear, kaleidoscopic world. So the question is how you maneuver in a world like that. And the answer is that you want to keep as many options open as possible. You go for viability, something that’s workable, rather than what’s ‘optimal.’ A lot of people say to that, ‘Aren’t you than accepting second best?’ No, you’re not, because optimization isn’t well-defined anymore. What you’re trying to do is maximize robustness, or survivability, in the face of an ill-defined future. And that, in turn, puts a premium on becoming aware of nonlinear relationships and causal pathways as best we can. You observe the world very, very carefully, and you don't expect circumstances to last."
This kind of sums up the types of questions that I am interested in tackling and deftly explains why in my Ph.D thesis I was interested in finding potential solutions, with a focus on real-time, distribution, and low power, rather than optimal solutions from a more centralised algorithm.
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A Visit from Rafael

Rafael Bordini will be visiting us in SoC next week. He will be giving a seminar entitled "A Verifiable Approach to Programming Multi-Agent Systems" and hopefully will spend the rest of the day chatting with ARG about possible avenues for joint work. The absract for his talk is as follows; "This talk will provide an overview of a particular approach to programming multi-agent systems and how we aim to do formal verification of systems programmed according to that approach. The talk covers some features of Jason, a Java-based interpreter for a variant of a logic-based agent-oriented programming language called AgentSpeak, and mentions various ongoing research strands related to it. The talk also gives a brief account of recent research aimed at developing a library of common features of agent programming languages so as to facilitate the use model-checking techniques for the verification of multi-agent systems written in such languages." I have met Rafael a couple of times and he is a thoroughly nice chap so I am quite looking forward to his visit. Anybody who can make it to the Wolfson Research Theatre on 27th February @ 12:30 should come along because they are in for a treat.
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