Dear Friends,
Today, we had a discussion about developing simulators
for RoboCup Rescue Simulation Competitions, we faced
the following question :
"Is a disaster simulator being considered as
black-box for agents and agent developers? In other
words, are the agents allowed to have the direct
knowledge about how a simulator works? Should a
simulator developer document the way in which his/her
simulator simulates a disaster? And if so are agent
developers able to use this data directly? For example
as an agent developer, are we able to know exactly
what the effect of an extinguish action is on a
burning building?"
In our team, We had different opinions about this
situation:
- Some of us think that as unpredictability is the
nature of disasters, agents are not allowed to have
any information about how a simulator works and an
agent or agent developer should infer and conclude
rules by observation and learning.
- Some of us think the different way; The main goal of
RoboCup Rescue Simulation is not in dealing with
black-box simulators. The main goal is improving
inter-agent cooperation and coordination in a dynamic
environment. So each disaster simulator should have a
predefined behaviour that can be programmed directly
by agents and agent developers can study the source
code of a disaster simulator to see how it behaves and
use the results in their agents.
- The third group thinks that the behaviour of a
disaster simulator should be documented and free for
use by agent developers, but only to some extents.
Certain kind of information is allowed to be
documented and certain kind of information about the
internals of the diaster simulator should be private.
For example in a model the parameters being considered
by the simulator to simulate a behaviour should be
documented and public for use but the information
about how these parameters are related to each other
and the behaviour must be kept private and cannot be
used by agent developers.
At last we decided to ask this question here in order
to know the opinions of other agent/simulator
developers and also the way this situation is handled
by the technical committee.
Regards,
Mohsen Izadi,
S.O.S. Member
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