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Comment by qwe098cube | Hacker News Reader

I have read "multi-agent system" or "agent based programming" a few times, but I have not yet understood what is meant by it.

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This is a great explanation as to why modeling the behaviours of each "agent" (a citizen in this case) is more realistic than attempting to model the system (a city) as a whole.

https://theconversation.com/how-big-data-and-the-sims-are-he...

That article provides excellent context. Thanks for sharing.

The featured simulation is by Nick Malleson. His website is full of excellent (and relavent) resources.

http://www.nickmalleson.co.uk/

This looks like cellular-automata and other reactive a-life -- while I suppose you could stretch the def'n of multi-agent systems to cover these, it's certainly not the first thing that you'll find in the literature. Cool though.

Smalltalk had some groundbreaking ideas -- but "an app. is an image of the whole, monkey-patched class hierarchy shipped with the entire system" certainly wasn't it's greatest contribution.

That “certainly” is a little funny to hear in the age of docker images.

Nice one! One could also cite Electron apps. But I don't think people are entirely happy w/containers or Electron apps for similar reasons of their monolithic nature, image size, versioning, patching, etc. At least w/Docker you have a DockerFile that specifies the composition semantics -- in ST you tend to just save an image in a magic state that was the result of user interactions.

Yoav Shoham's paper is the start of agent-oriented programming http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/ioerger/cs631-fall05/AOP.pdf - it is also well written

It's basically programming an ant, or an ant prototype, with some simple rules, and hoping the interaction among a swarm of them will create some emergent behavior at the colony level.

As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-based_model I believe

It just means running separate processes that communicate, like the programs on your PC.

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