Merchandise of the Devil's workshop

Note: Ramblings basically. But the excerpt struck quite a chord and so decided to post it anyway.

“Basically, you can think of a multi-agent environment as something like a chessboard, and the agents like chess pieces. The agents interact on the board to attain a goal, just the way the chess pieces move to win a game. The difference is that nobody is moving the agents. They interact on their own to produce the outcome.

If you design the agents to have memory, they can know things about their environment. They remember where they've been on the board, and what happened there. They can go back to certain places, with certain expectations. Eventually, programmers say the agents have beliefs about their environment, and that they are acting on those beliefs. That's not literally true, of course, but it might as well be true. It looks that way.

But what's interesting is that over time, some agents develop mistaken beliefs. Whether from a motivation conflict, or some other reason, they start acting inappropriately. The environment has changed but they don't seem to know it. They repeat outmoded patterns. Their behaviour no longer reflects the reality of the chessboard. It's as if they're stuck in the past.

In other multi-agent programs, they just get bypassed, pushed to the periphery while the main thrust of agents moves on. Some programs have a "grim reaper" module that sifts them out from time to time, and pulls them off the board.

But the point is, they're stuck in their own past. Sometimes they pull themselves
together, and get back on track. Sometimes they don't!”

Prey - Michael Crichton

When Darwin proclaimed we walked down from the trees, the reactions varied from angry disbelief to stunned awe. He spoke of evolution in terms of vestigial cortex bones and skull structure that people cared so less about that they nothinged it. And then the environmentalists spoke of adaptation that occurs continuously and gave examples of moths that developed pigmentation to escape from the predators. This was greeted with equal indifference. Though these are contexts that span centuries or decades, not concerning us, the people, there are more subtle evolutions that happen in the life cycle of a normal human being imbibing in them the need to change. Some call it maturing, some say it’s the phase of life, I call it more of a desperate measure.

No one likes to change, in any manner unless its almost inevitable. A lot of factors play a part in bringing about even the most simple change in a person. And that is what makes the entire scenario unpredictable cos these factors include the people around you and a small change in them triggers chaos when multiple ‘environments’ are involved. My recent interest in game theory is what made me see the role of the other players in your decisions and actions. Here we are not concerned with just the presence of other agents but also the absence of agents that were present.

I’ve had this habit of trying to extrapolate the observations I make about people to their reaction to different scenarios. The worst part is I used to tell them what was going on in their mind just by the first word they tell me(if I knew they are ready for it). This is because immaterial of the change in environment the basic nature of a person remains the same at least over a frame of time. Now I’ve started holding back my ‘insights’ cos I realised how much I value my own personal space. A decison that comes from often putting yourself into other's shoes a lot (which am not gonna do more often for a) fear of dermatitis b) its just not worth it)

The problem with trying to extrapolate your own behaviour is that either way you lose. You are right, u can’t do anything about it. U are wrong, u don’t know yourself. Its more like a recursive loop without a exit criteria. Once u ask more questions than you need to, u just can’t get out of it, and the system gets hung. The series of events that got me started on this have now gone stale. But the lessons learnt will hopefully be preserved.

This is possibly the most incoherent I’ve been since my antenna paper in my 6th semester. But my new found ego decided to post it anyway. Will be back on track soon(Thank you Mr.Crichton).