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Ten holes on a white background

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Above is an exact replica of ten holes on a white background that Nil and I saw today at an art museum.  Only the background was a white wall and the holes were drilled into the wall.

 

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Our contribution to the art world is Eleven holes on a white background :).

Some of the art had these black pieces of tape on the floor surrounding them so if someone crossed the black tap a beep would sound and a security person would tell you to step away from the art.  So, we need a break so we found the average time between someone setting the alarms off :).  It was 40 seconds!  So on average every 40 seconds someone crossed one of those black lines.  They really should have used a brighter color other than black like red that maybe even had words like do not cross.

Reverse Double Dutch Auction

Seems like an interesting idea for Courier World.  Description of a Double Dutch Auction from (Introducing interaction-based auctions into a model agent-based e-commerce system—preliminary considerations):

This auction is relatively counterintuitive and in
its basic version works like this (based on [1]): a buyer
price clock starts ticking at a very high price and continues
downward. At some point the buyer stops the clock
and bids on the unit at a favorable price. At this point
a seller clock starts upward from a very low price and
continues to ascend until stopped by a seller (who offers
product at that price). Then the buyer clock resumes in a
downward direction, followed by the seller clock moving
upward. Trading is over when the two prices cross
(purchase is made at the crossover point).

 

So a reverse version would be the above just in reverse.

 

Using Twitter as a proxy for malicious intent

Today I went to a security talk and the speaker gave a demonstration of how when you tweet a link various “robots” will follow the link and index it and do other things.  He gave a couple of example of what could be done.  One example was tweeting links to login forms with valid user id but invalid password.  Since most login forms will lock the user out after some number of tries this will annoy users.  Especially since based on his research the links will be revisited long into the future.  So, the user may have to reset their password multiple times.  If you had all of the usernames one could lockout all of the users without anyone knowing it was you who did it.

He also was trying to actually figure out whether it was a human that actually attempted to load the link.  So, he discovered that different browsers have a certain cut off on the number of 403 redirects it will handle before quitting.  However, he has found that many bots will just continue to follow the redirects.

He also showed some other cool hacks.  The spring lunch group went out with a bang :)!

Integrating Agent Models

In my earlier post I was considering combining game theory and measure theory methodologies of MAS and swarm systems.  From my research into this topic I found this paper https://jacobstechnology.com/acs/pdf/ESOA06Hybrid.pdf.  Although it seems like the people who published it are respectable, the paper has never been cited.  Which is strange since it is an interesting topic.  They came to the same questions I have about combining agent/swarm methodologies.

To what extent can we construct a unified development methodology that supports
both extremes (and thus intermediate agent types as well)? It is clumsy to have to use
one methodology [38] for BDI agents, and a completely separate one [26] for
swarming agents. Hybrid systems will only become commonplace when both kinds of
agents can be developed within an integrated framework.

 

They believe that integrating different agent models is an important problem.

 

Also, before that paper was published, GMU had published a paper Cooperative Multiagent Learning: The State of the Art.  In their conclusion they stated the need for Team Heterogeneity.  Meaning that the team is composed of agents with differing abilities.  They also make the case for when the team is too large that the agent’s abilities can’t all be different.  This is the conclusion I came to.  For example, when there are swarms interacting with more complex multiagent systems.  How do they cooperate and learn from each other?  What is the framework for such interaction?  How can the agent’s mathematical underpinnings act as a catalyst for communication for teaching/learning?  Can a universal framework be developed?