Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Communication models

[glen e. p. ropella]

Steve Railsback wrote:
> We discussed 3 kinds of interaction or communication: (1) Direct, when 
> agents directly exchange information with each other (or fight or kill 
> each other...), (2) Mediated, in which communication is via consumption 
> or production of a shared resource, and (3) Interaction fields, where 
> agents respond to the combined effects of multiple neighbors.

Since we are talking about "agents", it might be appropriate to extend 
(2) (or, perhaps it's a hybrid between all 3 of your categories) to 
include "proxies" or communication where the source of the transmission 
is one actor and the content of the transmission sits (or is 
processed/modified) inside and moves between other actors for some 
period before reaching its destination.  (It's "communication" when it's 
semantic and general interaction when it may not be semantic.)

I don't think this type of interaction fits well into (2) or (3), 
especially when the interstitial agents really are proxies rather than 
actors in their own right.  The less processing the intermediating 
agents do, the less accurate (1) and (3) are as descriptions of the 
causal chain.  The more processing the intermediating agents do, the 
less accurate (2) is.

Ultimately, of course, all of it boils down to (1).  The other 
categories are abstractions, especially in a message-passing or 
event-based ontology.  The real question is what level of discourse is 
the most important for any given model.  Can a "space" be an actor in 
the context of machine X modeling system Y?  Does it make sense to say 
that object A communicates semantically with object B?  Is the 
interaction pure simulus-response reactivity (data-driven) or is there 
logic (i.e. inference, abstraction, semantics) inside the objects? 
These are all questions that impact the usefulness of a model as a 
story-telling device.

--
glen e. p. ropella              =><=                Hail Eris!
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