Social Mental Shaping: Modelling the Impact of Sociality on Autonomous Agents' Mental States

This paper presents a framework that captures how the social nature of agents that are situated in a multi-agent environment impacts upon their individual mental states. Roles and relationships provide an abstraction upon which we develop the notion of social mental shaping. This allows us to extend the standard Belief-Desire-Intention model to account for how common social phenomena (e.g. cooperation, collaborative problem-solving and negotiation) can be integrated into a unified theoretical perspective that reflects a fully explicated model of the autonomous agent's mental state

What is a model, why people don't trust them, and why they should

It is easier to make one�s way in the world if one has some sort of expectation of the world�s future behaviour. Even when facing a very complex problem, we are rarely in a state of full ignorance: some expectations of system behaviour and the level of risk arising from uncertainty are usually available and it is on the basis of these expectations that most decisions are taken. Humans use models, which are mental or formal representations of reality, to generate these expectations, employing an ability that is shared more or less by all forms of life. Whether it is a tree responding to shortening day length by dropping its leaves and preparing its metabolism for the winter ahead or a naked Pleistocene ape storing food in advance of winter for the same reasons, both are using models. This view leads to two outcomes. The first is that predictions, seen as an expectation of ranges of future behaviours, are not just desirable, but necessary for decision-making. The often-asked question �do models provide reliable predictions?� then shifts to �given a certain problem, what type of models provide the most useful and reliable prediction?� The second outcome is that modelling is no longer a scientist�s activity but is instead a social process. Different types of models can be employed to ensure that all available information is included in model building and that model results are understood, trusted and acted upon

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

(WP 2020-01) The Sea Battle Tomorrow: The Identity of Reflexive Economic Agents

This paper develops a conception of reflexive economic agents as an alternative to the standard utility conception, and explains individual identity in terms of how agents adjust to change in a self-organizing way, an idea developed from Herbert Simon. The paper distinguishes closed equilibrium and open process conceptions of the economy, and argues the former fails to explain time in a before-and-after sense in connection with Aristotle’s sea battle problem. A causal model is developed to represent the process conception, and a structure-agency understanding of the adjustment behavior of reflexive economic agents is illustrated using Merton’s self-fulfilling prophecy analysis. Simon’s account of how adjustment behavior has stopping points is then shown to underlie how agents’ identities are disrupted and then self-organized, and the identity analysis this involves is applied to the different identity models of Merton, Ross, Arthur, and Kirman. Finally, the self-organization idea is linked to the recent ‘preference purification’ debate in bounded rationality theory regarding the ‘inner rational agent trapped in an outer psychological shell,’ and it is argued that the behavior of self-organizing agents involves them taking positions toward their own individual identities