CSCE 475/875
Final
Project Assignment:
Local
Decisions vs. Global Coherence
Assigned: September 23, 2013
Due: December 16, 2013
(Project 5 minutes late will not be
accepted)
A Supplement: An Example, Continued
This supplement is to give you an example of how changes are to be reported after your proposal has been reviewed.
Comment #1: In your problem statement, you indicated that
each mine is set to go off on its own within a specific time. However, in your proposal, the range of these
values is not stated.
Response: Each mine is set to go off on its own after 1-500 ticks,
assuming that each agent can only take at most one step per tick. The actual value will be randomly generated
for each mine using a uniform distribution.
Comment #2: How are you going to simulate each mine? Perhaps, you will need to create a second
type of agents: “mine agents”. These
agents will be just dummy agents. Each
has a location and a number that indicates the number of cycles to
explosion. And the number ticks down
until the agent explodes. And then each
agent also keeps track of its status: ticking or exploded. Something like that.
Response: Yes, we will create a second type of agents to deal to
“represent” mines. These agents will not
be able to communicate with other agents at all. However, a mine sweeper agent will be able to
query a mine agent to find out the “time” to explosion.
Comment #3: In your experiments, you did not indicate how
you were going to analyze your results to obtain a report on local decisions
vs. global coherence. The final project
assignment (under “Experiments and Report”) has very specific items to be
included in the summary of your simulation runs.
Response: Making local decisions is reflected in the number of
agents that an agent contacts throughout its lifetime in our experiments, and
the amount of messages sent by the agent.
The smaller the number of agents that an agent contacts and the lesser
the amount of messages sent by the agent indicate that the agent is likely making
more local decisions. Thus, in our experiments, we will also collect data on these two numbers
and report on how they relate to the emergent behavior (defined as
effectiveness and efficiency as previously stated in our proposal).