Intelligent agents are autonomous agents that interact through fundamental communication procedures called protocols. A protocol facilitates message passing between two or more agents within a society, allowing knowledge to flow and diffuse between members.
Knowledge acts as the fundamental currency of power within a social system, as one can apply knowledge in the pursuit of goals. A knowledge goal is a type of goal whose target is reached by obtaining some specific unknown information.
The amount of knowledge held by an agent is related to how well it can accomplish goals. A knowledge goal increases one’s ability to succeed through the obtainment of new knowledge, and therefore increases the probability that further knowledge will be obtained by the agent in the future.
Implicit power structures are generated by the distribution of knowledge across a social system. Relations emerge between agents acting in the same environment, and one type is that of an order relation. Order relations define hierarchical inequalities within a sub-population, where one or more agents act in subordination to another.
Order relations forms power structures within a society that grant agents at the top of a hierarchy access to certain mechanisms of control over those who exist below them. Two forms of power enable the control of subordinates, namely surveillance, where behavior is observed and measured, and judgement, where behavior is rewarded or punished. Control through the application of power as described enables supervisors to manipulate the actions of subordinate agents at will.
All agents have the capacity to measure and distribute knowledge. Social systems are always embedded in physical space, and the neighbors of a agent are those whose spatial distance from the agent is below some threshold. An agent is considered accessible with respect to another when there exists a transmission line between them. A transmission line carries information from an agent across space to another agent, referred to as the sender and receiver agents, respectively.
Spatial and temporal limitations restrict transmission between agents. All transmission lines are defined by their length, or the distance between sender and receiver. The length dictates the time it takes for information to travel between sender to receiver. Spatiotemporal constraints are associated with the physical field in which the society is embedded.
All agents perform actions, and make observations of social and physical landscapes. Information observed by the agent leads to new knowledge, and certain decision rules applied by the agent allow leaps to occur between concepts that are not immediately related. Say an observation of an event by an agent occurs, for which there is no obvious cause (i.e. another event that is observed prior to the effect). In this case, an agent uses a form of reckoning through the application of a belief system. A belief system is a network of concepts and relations that is constructed over time, and allows one to deduce valid assumptions from partial information using rules of inference.
Agents consider the possible actions they can take at any given time, assigning preferences based on goals, creating an order that allows for comparisons between events where one is ‘greater than’ the other with respect to the objectives of the agent. Order is used to categorize possibilities and filter out certain undesirable actions. The result a subset of possibilities from the original set who all have preference ratings greater than or equal to some threshold. These are considered to be the new set of possible actions, effectively ignoring every action that is not beneficial. This optimizes the problem-solving procedure by simplifying the solution space from which an agent makes selections.
Goals are considered in terms of their subjective urgency, which is assigned by an agent depending on the complexity of the problem, the size of the solution space, the length of time before that goal is realized (i.e. induces a reward or punishment), and the magnitude of the resulting utility. Urgency dictates how solutions are chosen, and in what order, given a set of goals that are active at some point in time. High urgency is related to lower consideration of alternatives, and can cause an agent to select the first solution considered, regardless of more suitable options.
Negotiation defines a communication protocol in which a set of agents attempt to normalize their collective solution space, which is to say they the existence of shared knowledge is desired for some problem. Conflict in belief systems are virtually inevitable for any system of interaction, but negotiation formalizes the process of reducing that conflict.
Protocols are built up from simple constraints, which represent certain requirements to which the participants of an interaction must conform. the acceptance or denial of a potential interaction is given by the agent’s ability or inability to fall in line with the associated constraints. If any one agent denies an interaction, the protocol is invalid and thus does not occur. There must be a mutual agreement between participants if a given interaction is to take place.
All interactions are formed by individuals attempting to satisfy their own goals within the same space. If an agent is driven toward some interaction, the resulting reward will be positive or negative depending on the acceptance or denial of the associated protocol.
The overlap between goals of two or more agents allow for cooperative or competitive interactions depending on whether each participant benefits from the actions of the others or if the success of one participant causes all the others to fail.
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