On May 24, 2009, at 10:05 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
Steve wrote: 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').
Ah, by control over its own execution, I meant "execution" as thread of computation.
But yes, given the other meaning of execution, I agree with you with respect to how to probably handle the death and garbage collection. I suspect we might adopt more of an cellular apotosis model <http://evolutionofcomputing.org/Multicellular/Apoptosis.html > where agents remove themselves unless they constantly receieve a keep-alive-message from other agents. There's also the idea that there should be a mechanism where agents will migrate away from the edge of the network where users are to lower cost, high latency parts of the network when they are less in demand - a kind of cold storage.
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