Autonomous Agents Modelling Other Agents: A Comprehensive Survey and Open Problems

Much research in artificial intelligence is concerned with the development of autonomous agents that can interact effectively with other agents. An important aspect of such agents is the ability to reason about the behaviours of other agents, by constructing models which make predictions about various properties of interest (such as actions, goals, beliefs) of the modelled agents. A variety of modelling approaches now exist which vary widely in their methodology and underlying assumptions, catering to the needs of the different sub-communities within which they were developed and reflecting the different practical uses for which they are intended. The purpose of the present article is to provide a comprehensive survey of the salient modelling methods which can be found in the literature. The article concludes with a discussion of open problems which may form the basis for fruitful future research.Comment: Final manuscript (46 pages), published in Artificial Intelligence Journal. The arXiv version also contains a table of contents after the abstract, but is otherwise identical to the AIJ version. Keywords: autonomous agents, multiagent systems, modelling other agents, opponent modellin

Origin of Lower Cretaceous ('Nubian') sandstones of North-east Africa and Arabia from detrital zircon U-Pb SHRIMP dating

Lower Cretaceous sandstones of the type exposed in Israel, deposited over much of North Africa and Arabia as widespread sandstone sheets, typically are mineralogically and texturally mature. Previous petrographic examinations suggested that the Lower Cretaceous sandstones are at least partly a product of recycling and the present study supports this notion. The results of U-Pb Sensitive High Resolution Ion Micro-Probe (SHRIMP) dating of detrital zircons from the Lower Cretaceous section exposed in Israel indicate that they are dominated by detrital zircons of Neoproterozoic age, mainly concentrated in the 0·55 to 0·65 Ga interval, with various amounts of older (pre-Neoproterozoic) zircons (of 0·95 to 1·10, 1·7 to 2·0 and 2·6 to 2·65 Ga age groups). The overall age signal is similar to detrital zircon age spectra previously obtained from the Cambrian-Ordovician sections of Israel and Jordan. Remarkably, the detrital zircon spectra remained almost unchanged for nearly 400 Myr. Thus, the most probable provenance of the Lower Cretaceous sandstone is the recycling of relatively proximal Palaeozoic sandstone. Since first unroofed from above pan-African terranes closer to the secession of orogeny, the ensuing siliciclastics were recycled repeatedly throughout the Phanerozoic with little additional basement denudation. The Lower Cretaceous sandstone comprises quartz sand that was first eroded from above pan-African orogens ca 400 Myr prior to deposition

Discrimination nets as psychological models

Simulations of human cognitive processes often employ discrimination nets to model the access of permanent memory. We consider two types of discrimination nets—EPAM and positive-proper-only nets—and argue that they have insufficient psychological validity. Their deficiencies arise from negative properties, insufficient sensitivity to the discriminativeness of properties, extreme sensitivity to missing or incorrect properties, inefficiency in representing multiple knowledge domains, and seriality. We argue that these deficiencies stem from a high degree of test contingency in utilizing property information during acquisition and memory search. Discrimination nets are compared to other models that have less or no test contingency (e.g., PANDEMONIUM) and that thereby avoid the problems of discrimination nets. We propose that understanding test contingency and discovering psychologically valid ways to implement it will be central to understanding and simulating memory indexing in human cognition