Volume 14, 1995, No. 6


Artificial Social Systems

Y. Moses, M. Tenneholtz

Abstract. An artificial social system is a set of restrictions of agents' behaviors in a multi-agent environment. Its role is to allow agents to coexist in a shared environment and pursue their respective goals in the presence of other agents. This paper argues that artificial social systems exist in practically every multi-agent system, and play a major role in the performance and effectiveness of the agents. We propose artificial social systems as an explicit and formal object of study, and investigate several basic issues that arise in their design.

 

Controlling the Consumption of Storage with Sliding Priority Search in a Hyper-Linking Based Theorem Prover

S.-J- Lee, D.A. Plaisted

Abstract. The hyper-linking strategy proposed in [17] eliminates duplication of instances of clauses during the process of inference. However, hyper/instances were generated exhaustively by breadth/first search which may cause memory-paging troubles for hard problems since all hyper-instances have to be stored and processed. We present a sliding priority search to provide control on the number of hyper-instances saved and the amount of memory consumed by discarding those instances whose priority value exceeds a priority bound. The bound is set automatically rather than by the user. A technique similar to iterative deepening is also applied to preserve completeness of the hyper-linking strategy. The sliding priority method enabled us to get a number of proofs that could not be obtained with breadth-first search.

 

Automated Transformation of Sequential Divide-And-Conquer Algorithms into Parallel Programs

B. Freisleben, T. Kielmann

Abstract. Divide-and-conquer algorithms obtain the solution to a given problem by dividing it into subproblems, solving these recursively and combining their solutions. In this paper we present a system that automatically transforms sequential divide-and-conquer algorithms written in the C programming language into parallel code which is then executed on message-passing multicomputers. The user of the system is expected to add only a few annotations to an existing sequential program. The strategies required for transforming sequential source code to executable binaries are discussed. The performance speedups attainable will be illustrated by several examples.

 

Sequential and Parallel Approximate Convex Hull Algorithms

Ch.E. Kim, I. Stojmenovič

Abstract. This paper defines the area measure of the quality of approximate convex hulls and proposes two new approximate convex hull algorithms. The first one is superior to known  techniques under the area measure and comparable under the distance measure and time complexity. The second algorithm is superior to all known algorithms in both area and distance measures (including the first algorithm) while having slightly higher time complexity. Corresponding parallel algorithms for finding approximate convex hull are also described.

 

On Varieties of Density and Crossing Properties for Event Structures

V.E. Kotov, S.A. Starkova, I.B. Virbitskaite

Abstract. We study prime event structures as models for nondeterministic processes and some of their properties known as discreteness, density and crossing. These properties allow inconsistency to be avoided between syntactic and semantic representations of processes. A number close relationships between different density and crossing concepts is established. It has turned out that in an M-dense event structure all of the executions are completely  "successful" (i.e. at least one successor (if it exists) for any event occurring in the execution must also occur).


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