Douglas Roberts wrote:
Oregon just passed an assisted suicide law...
To better describe agent-oriented, I would like to extend an
object to:
1)
2)
3) have control over its own execution
4)
5)
Typically garbage collectors observe for objects that are isolated from
all others, and then call finalization routines on their behalf (like
executors of a will). But for agent simulations, I think it would be
useful to have voluntary and involuntary kill capability integrated in
the collector whereby all references to that object would be nulled and
the finalization process run. Assisted suicide would be the voluntary
form, presumably limited by rules that examine of various properties of
the object and connected objects.
The unique applicability to ABM is that engineered programs have objects
in different roles for reasons, and it would break the whole thing to
have the program act on itself that way. On the other hand, ABMs are
looser collections of more autonomous objects where agents come and go,
and the proper analogy is more often killing or resource depletion,
rather voluntary self-removal (e.g. digging your own grave via a
`destructor').
Marcus
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