Emergência e Colapso De Poder

• Main Author: Coelho, Francisco Manuel Gonçalves
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: Portuguese
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2005
• Subjects: Artificial intelligence; Information science
• ISBN: 9798505554623

This thesis proposes a deeper research about the nuclear ideas for intelligent agents deliberation and control models: First, individual power, defined as the agent’s set of capabilities for action, the will, associated with the competency for the agent’s commitments coordination and also the knowledge about the environment, built autonomously by the agentDecision must process and build, in useful time, the possible relevant information, in order to be effective. It is requested, to the intelligent agent, the interpret his, possibly dynamic and unpredictable, environment. Later on, the agent should use that information to choose, among the considered possibilities, the course of action from which should result the realisation of his dominant objectivesSo, this work started by observing the consequences that agents with different skills —therefore differing in their individual power— cause in the dynamics of their societies. Although the conclusions of those preliminary observations are intuitively obvious, it was attended to get the experimental support of such intuition. Once observed the importance (at least causal) of individual power, the thesis continued with the research of its constituent elements.Here the research splited, trying to achieve, with diversity, a widen perspective about individual power, will and how these two themes could contribute to the making of intelligent agentsOne tried to understand, on one hand, what is will’s competence and how is it related with individual power. From this task resulted a proto-architecture for the decision process, where it is possible the replication of both reactive and deliberative controlsOn the other hand, one also accounted that the knowledge available to the agent is one of the most influent elements in his behaviour. In particular, it should be important that an agent knows, given a time series, how hard it would be to project future values. From this subject study resulted a measure of the predictive quality of time series. Additionally, this measure can also be applied by the researcher, extending the data analysis toolsetIn third place, looking at the agent’s mind as a dynamic system, where different mental states up rise, evolve and, eventually vanish, one extended this identification to the notion of meta agent, i.e. an agent whose environment (percepted and acted upon) is, on his turn, the mental space of another agent. Then an experiment was conducted, based in reactive behaviours, where a meta agent recovers the functionality of his envelope-agent, supposedly damaged.At last, the paths to individual power were joined: the agent’s control structured by meta agency, the commitments processing by the will and the construction of knowledge by the predictive quality. To that, it was created a virtual scenario, where two teams, a reference one —with reactive control agents— and another, test, compete for the best performance. The test team embodies the goal integration: Their agents are controlled by meta agency, the respective commitments managed by the will and information form the environment is processed, with the contribute from the predictive quality, to the construction of knowledge about it