Multiagent Learning

So, I really want my PhD thesis topic to be on large scale (>8 agents) heterogeneous multi agent learning.  The two problems in MAL are speed and generality.  The main way I see solving the speed problem is by providing the learning agent information (or background knowledge or reasonable prior probabilities).  This has been the study of transfer learning.  The other problem that we have is application.  I don’t know of any applications that would necessitate many learning agents.  However, I believe that there is an application, I just haven’t found it yet.  Most application areas are really just system development.  Solving the problem of how do I engineer this system so that given these agents with their behaviors can solve a problem or do a task etc.  That is designing systems.  The other problem is that when the number of agents increases the system may no longer be manageable in terms of actually interpreting the system.  This is another area that would be useful.  However, as you get >100 agents you end up studying an economics problem rather than a MAL problem.  Which is not what I want to do.  I intend on creating some MAS in MASON and implement a few of the current learning algorithms and see how they fair on problems requiring ~8 agents.  So, I will write some more on how I plan on evaluating them and what sort of test problems I will develop.