Communication and Agents

• One of the key things about agents is that they communicate.
• If you did it, remember how much extra work the code had when we added communication between the miner and Elsa (lab 2)?
• It was a lot of work, but remember how much more complex things became. The system started to look relatively intelligent.
• In this case, and in most cases currently, communication was really just an integer, or an enumerated type.
• You can go a long way with this.
• Grab the gold.
• You can make things a bit more sophisticated by passing variables.
• Instead of specific instructions, instructions like verb noun, gives you a lot more power with reduced bandwidth.
• In this case verb is grab and noun is the gold, but you could also have hit troll.
• Unfortunately, it also raises the spectre of communication problems. What if A sends a message to B, but B is still processing an earlier message?
• Natural Language is pretty hard, but you can can it.