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Multiagent Systems : Algorithmic, Game - Theoretic, and Logical Foundations
Imagine a personal software agent engaging in electronic commerce on your behalf. Say the task of this agent is to track goods available for sale in various online venues over time, and to purchase some of them on your behalf for an attractive price. In order to be successful, your agent will need to embody your preferences for products, your budget, and in general your knowledge about the environment in which it will operate. Moreover, the agent will need to embody your knowledge of other similar agents with which it will interact (e.g., agents who might compete with it in an auction, or agents representing store owners)?including their own preferences and knowledge. A collection of such agents forms a multiagent system. The goal of this book is to bring under one roof a variety of ideas and techniques that provide foundations for modeling, reasoning about, and building multiagent systems. Somewhat strangely for a book that purports to be rigorous, we will not give a precise definition of a multiagent system. The reason is that many competing, mutually inconsistent answers have been offered in the past. Indeed, even the seemingly simpler question?What is a (single) agent??has resisted a definitive answer. For our purposes, the following loose definition will suffice: Multiagent systems are those systems that include multiple autonomous entities with either diverging information or diverging interests, or both. Scope of the book The motivation for studying multiagent systems often stems from interest in artificial (software or hardware) agents, for example software agents living on the Internet. Indeed, the Internet can be viewed as the ultimate platform for interaction among self-interested, distributed computational entities. Such agents can be trading agents of the sort discussed above, ?interface agents? that facilitate the interaction between the user and various computational resources (including other interface agents), game-playing agents that assist (or replace) human players in a multiplayer game, or autonomous robots in a multi-robot setting. However, while the material is written by computer scientists with computational sensibilities, it is quite interdisciplinary and the material is in general fairly abstract. Many of the ideas apply to?and indeed are often taken from?inquiries about human individuals and institutions. xiv Introduction The material spans disciplines as diverse as computer science (including artificial intelligence, theory, and distributed systems), economics (chiefly microeconomic theory), operations research, analytic philosophy, and linguistics. The technical material includes logic, probability theory, game theory, and optimization. Each of the topics covered easily supports multiple independent books and courses, and this book does not aim to replace them. Rather, the goal has been to gather the most important elements from each discipline and weave them together into a balanced and accurate introduction to this broad field. The intended reader is a graduate student or an advanced undergraduate, prototypically, but not necessarily, in computer science. Since the umbrella of multiagent systems is so broad, the questions of what to include in any book on the topic and how to organize the selected material are crucial. To begin with, this book concentrates on foundational topics rather than surface applications. Although we will occasionally make reference to real-world applications, we will do so primarily to clarify the concepts involved; this is despite the practical motivations professed earlier. And so this is the wrong text for the reader interested in a practical guide into building this or that sort of software. The emphasis is rather on important concepts and the essential mathematics behind them. The intention is to delve in enough detail into each topic to be able to tackle some technical material, and then to point the reader in the right directions for further education on particular topics. Our decision was thus to include predominantly established, rigorous material that is likely to withstand the test of time, and to emphasize computational perspectives where appropriate. This still left us with vast material from which to choose. In understanding the selection made here, it is useful to keep in mind the following keywords: coordination, competition, algorithms, game theory, and logic. These terms will help frame the chapter overview that follows. Overview of the chapters Starting with issues of coordination, we begin in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 with distributed problem solving.
Ketersediaan
| Call Number | Location | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Tan 006. 3 Sho m | PSB lt.dasar - Pascasarjana | 1 |
| Penerbit | Cambridge Cambridge University Press., 2009 |
|---|---|
| Edisi | - |
| Subjek | Electronic data processing Intelligent agents ( Computer Software ) Distributed processing |
| ISBN/ISSN | - |
| Klasifikasi | - |
| Deskripsi Fisik | - |
| Info Detail Spesifik | - |
| Other Version/Related | Tidak tersedia versi lain |
| Lampiran Berkas | Tidak Ada Data |