Design of multi-agent systems

Distributed sensing, swarm sensing, adaptive social learning, multi-agent adaptation, iterated game theory with learning etc

October 13, 2014 — May 5, 2025

agents
bounded compute
collective knowledge
concurrency hell
distributed
economics
edge computing
extended self
game theory
incentive mechanisms
machine learning
networks
swarm

Suspiciously similar content

Designing swarms and societies to get things done. e.g. probability collectives (are they a thing?) and the nature-inspired algorithms (ant colonies, particle swarms, that one based on choirs…), distributed consistency…

1 Local versus global design

I’m interested in the constraints on what global organising can be done using local information. There are formal approaches to this, e.g. H. Wang and Rubenstein (), and more casual, fun ones like Mordvintsev et al. (), who use Cellular Automata as a case study.

2 Collective utility function design

Figure 1

If you have autonomous agents that need to cooperate, how do you design their private utility? Although this looks a bit like collective decisions, I am thinking of more incentive design-oriented questions, but maybe one where we get to choose the utility function, not just the mechanism. Maybe an inverse collective action problem.

3 Learning with theory of mind

Per default a lot of the literature thinks about fixed agent configuration. For an interesting generalisation, see learning with theory of mind.

4 Tooling

4.1 Neural MMO

A large game environment (; ; ). Claim to fame: leveraging gaming-industry technology to provide a large open world for agent interaction.

4.2 AgentScope

See Pan et al. ().

AgentScope is an innovative multi-agent platform designed to empower developers to build multi-agent applications with large-scale models. It features three high-level capabilities:

  • 🤝 Easy-to-Use: Designed for developers, with fruitful components, comprehensive documentation, and broad compatibility. Besides, AgentScope Workstation provides a drag-and-drop programming platform and a copilot for beginners of AgentScope!

  • ✅ High Robustness: Supporting customised fault-tolerance controls and retry mechanisms to enhance application stability.

  • 🚀 Actor-Based Distribution: Building distributed multi-agent applications in a centralised programming manner for streamlined development.

AgentScope provides a list of ModelWrapper to support both local model services and third-party model APIs.

5 As metaphor for human systems

See wisdom of crowds versus groupthink, or possible weaponised social media.

6 Incoming

7 References

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