Al,
Assuming you have an autonomous intelligent agent architecture, and that
Jess provides the reasoning function in that system, I believe those agents
should own both a Rete engine and a knowledge module. So modules in Jess
would be useful in my opinion. Even more important though for such
architectures would be the ability to run many Jess engines in the same JVM.
Encapsulation for agents is a lot more demanding than encapsulation for
objects - they require more independence of execution and decision making.
As far as the execution is concerned, it's practically impossible to run one
agent per JVM, and maintaining autonomy for multiple agents sharing the same
process is complex, but possible. However it would be silly to have one
(or a few, it doesn't make any difference) 'reasoning agent' where all
agents would go to get a decision. Instead each agent should have, I think,
its own reasoning power, i.e. Rete engine (in our case) and knowledge base.
Agents can be very lightweight - in some recent tests we ran tens and even
hundreds of them on the same JVM. The question that arises then is 'do we
have an inference engine small enough to fit this paradigm?'. For this
matter I would like very much to have a 'build your own Jess engine'
capability, where one is able to create and work with very small and simple
Jess engines, as well as larger and more sophisticated ones. Then we can
have all kinds of autonomous agents, more intelligent, less intelligent..
Best regards,
Alex Bejan
----- Original Message -----
From: Al Davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, April 12, 1999 7:50 PM
Subject: Re: JESS: Modules ...
> This kind of functionality would be VERY useful for the project I'm
> working on, too. Currently, we have a large multi-agent system that is
> using CLIPS 6.x (COOL) to partition the rule base. My current design for
> porting this to JESS was going to involve using a separate Rete engine
> for each agent (probably each in its own thread), and then providing a
> mechanism for simulating CLIPS export/import functionality. If anyone
> else has been looking at this kind of functionality, I'd be very
> interested in starting a discussion! :)
>
> Thanks,
> Alan Davis
> CAD Research Center / CDM Technologies
> Cal Poly State University
> San Luis Obispo, CA
> (805) 541-3750 x34
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
> alan littleford wrote:
> >
> > Ernest,
> > just a little something that has been on my Jess wish-list for
> > quite a while which is some form of support for modules. I don't know if
> > this has to be via the 'defmodule' construct or there is some other way,
> > but for the large system I am building the ability to partition the rule
> > base up into separate name spaces would be of immense value -- I
> > currently have to fake it out by cunning-pseudo-module-names which can
> > lead-to-confusion-and-problems.
> >
> > Could module support be hacked (in the best sense) by mere syntactic
> > sugar in the parser or does it go much further than that ?
> >
> > Anyone else out there who would really like modules ???
> >
> > As usual thanks for all the great work
> >
> > --
> > Alan Littleford Networks and Software
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (650)-964-4313
> >
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