Re: About sending and receiving mesages.

From: Miguel Arroz (arroz@guiamac.com)
Date: Wed 01 Sep 2004 - 11:39:12 GMT


Hi!

   I agree with you, but there is a problem with this approach. The
rules say the agent can receive only X messages in one cycle, so the
agent must look at their headers and decide if they want to save it, or
discard it. If you receive all the messages on the next cycle, with a
command telling you that "these are all the messages for this cycle",
you may do that easely. If you receive them immediately after the
others send them, you never know if that message is the last or not,
and you may be discarding information that you could save, because you
won't receive any more messages that cycle.

   Anyway, all this is kind of artificial. The right way to handle the
communication limits should be enforcing, in the kernel, some kind of
limitation (eg, each agent may only send X messages in a cycle), and
randomly loose messages (to simulate communication problems).

   Anyway, the transition to TCP is complicated enough for this year, so
this more advanced message filtering may be left for next year. Anyway,
I agree with you, way and tell messages should be processed immediately
after they arrive.

   Yours

Miguel Arroz

On 1 de set de 2004, at 11:54, Adrin Jalali wrote:

> Recall that this finction is called twice by kernel in each cycle.
> Once after
> passing t/2 (t is the total cycle time) of the cycle, and once at the
> end of
> the cycle. This means that all the actions of agents (containing tell,
> say,
> move, ...) are read by the kernel at the mid time of the cycle. And
> all updates
> and received messages are sent at the end of the cycle.
> We know that only the last command of agents sent to the kernel is to
> affect
> the world model, but why are tell and say commands processed like this?
> I think that's better and nearer to the real situation if kernel did
> the same
> about action commands, but were listening for the say & tell commands
> continuesly and when ever such a command were received, kernel sent
> them to the
> desired agents. We know that communication must make delay on dicision
> making
> of agents, but we can probably design much better agenst in the
> suggested
> situation and still have the delay time. I think that in the real
> world we
> don't have any restriction on the receiving of the messages.

       "GUERRA E' PAZ
        LIBERDADE E' ESCRAVIDAO
        IGNORANCIA E' FORCA" -- 1984

   Miguel Arroz - arroz@guiamac.com - http://www.guiamac.com



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