Agents, Multiagency & Emergence
the STA architecture

If it can Sense, Think and Act it is an agent...

THE CHALLENGE OF EMERGENCE:
"Bertrand Russel was once confronted by a woman who claimed that the Earth is carried on the back of a giant turtle, standing on the back of another - 'turtles all the way down.'
Today, from nanoscience to cosmology we are confronted with the problem of how smaller “computational turtles' (John Smart) give rise to a pyramid of turtles of increasing sizes.
“Old turtles in new shells” are reappearing in conferences on “computational synthesis,” “dynamical hierarchical synthesis” and “dynamic ontology."
We have little use for reductive theories...

Bottom-Up p Emergence, Synthesis
Top-Down q Decomposition, Analysis

Agent Level
"turtles all the way down"
Sense
(Input)
Think
(Processing)
Act
(Output)
Our focus is the realm of culture...
Global
Gulf of Tonkin incident
Congress passes Tonkin Resolution
US goes to war with Vietnam
National
9/11 world trade center attacked
Bush intel says Iraq complicit
US "shock and awe" attack on Iraq
Group
Julian Assange finds leaked documents
Assanges decides transparency reinforces democracy
Julian publishes papers, hires lawyers
Individual
look, see, listen, taste,
smell, feel...
think, imagine, meditate,
consider, react, dream,
plan, conspire, wonder...
eat, walk, talk, fight,
love, put, take, carry, make,
sing, dance...
Human agency results from these agents of mind responding to chemical and neuronal signals in kind... Minsky's "Society of Mind."
Hunger
sugar levels drop
attention turns to snacking
drives to Micky D for ice cream
Fear
dog bears teeth
evaluate fight or flight
waves arms and yells
Mating
with friends in Twilight saga
select wolfmen or vampires
choose both
Sheltering
shivering sets in
ponders relative merits of hot chocolate or sweater
assumes fetal position
Parenting
hears, "are we there yet"
checks mileage, time driving, time since last stop
pulls into Dennys
Artifacts and Nature are part of the human cultural, cognitive and behavioral process...
Artifacts
initial amd evolved emergent conditions
your simulations running on Windows 7
the overt behavior of your simulations
Nature
dog sees squeaky toy
dog gets hankering for squeaky toy
dog bites toy, toy squeaks, dog runs away
Our computational models are described using these programming agents...
The PC in its entirety
did anyone press a key?
did anyone move the mouse?
if not, keep asking...
if so, figure out the context of that event...
and then do something about it...
Windows API Event Handlers
detect a mouse movement
figure out if the mouse is pointing out an agent
show that agent's properties
C++ Function

function call with or without a parameter

run(100000);

iterate a problem 1,000,000 times...

void run (int iterations) {
     for(int i = 0; i < iterations; i++) {
          step();
     }
}

evolve a world