Friday, April 2, 2021

Spring has sprung

 


Spring has sprung and knocked me off badly. Had a horrible dental surgery, four hours plus on the dentist chair with billions of bad things happening. This was on Tuesday. Thought, oh dear, I guess I miscalculated how bad this was going to be, now, I will take my medicines and be back on my feet tomorrow. ho, ho, this was the good day. My body mounted a united front against the medication prescribed (medication that I had had several times before) and I got to feel really weak, as I kept being sick several times a day. 

Not good, not good at all. I'm finally better, touch wood, and  now I have read Terry Pratchett's Nation and I loved it. 

I was reminded of the many reasons why I love Pratchett's books: they do make you think about the important things in life in novel ways. My favorites are the Witches stories, I love all the witches, but Granny Weatherwax is a favorite: "If you want to amount to anything as a witch you got to learn three things. What’s real, what’s not real, and what’s the difference.” 

“We look to… the edges,' said Mistress Weatherwax. 'There’s a lot of edges, more than people know. Between life and death, this world and the next, night and day, right and wrong… an’ they need watchin’. We watch ‘em, we guard the sum of things.  

“You can‘t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it‘s just a cage.” 

Cage or no cage, it's time to go back to thinking about multiagent systems and what do we expect of them minimally. Well, if you have many agents, one expects that each one of them is a reasoning agent on its own and that its reasoning can be of the classical, constructive, linear  or modal variety. And similarly, when considering how they interact with each other, the same possibilities arrive. Thus it would make some sense to compare these kinds of reasoning agents. Something that we want to discuss next.

(when the internet is behaving a bit better and I can upload pictures!)


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