Ramsey Theory

Ramsey Theory address problems that ask the question “how many elements of some structure must there be to guarantee that a particular property will hold?”  This is the question that I want to know for brokers.  How many brokers must there be for no price wars to occur.

Very interesting ideas.  I liked the one example on wikipedia Schur’s theorem: for any given c there is a number N such that if the numbers 1, 2, …, N are coloured with c different colours, then there must be a pair of integers x, y such that x, y, and x+y are all the same colour

Prisons as multiagent systems

Wonder how prisoner transport routes are created and scheduled.  Maybe the whole prison system could be a test bed for “smart cities”.  They are just the controlled environment we need.  Wonder how much tech is involved in prisons currently.

Probably MAL could be applied somewhere.  Might be an application area worth looking into.

Maybe the prisoners, guards, cleaning people, ie the people in the building.  Maybe create a simulation of a prison and create a multiagent planner to assist the decision making regarding prisoner transport.  Maybe a social network.  CV for monitoring prisoner rehabilitation process.    With that data a better simulation can be produced. CV can already spot riots before they happen.

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.

Smart Logistics and the Knowledge Genesis Group

These are two pretty awesome companies/contractors.  They provide muliagent systems approach to solving real world problems.  They implement real time schedulers and optimization algorithms in the real world and not just as academics.  Pretty cool, too bad they aren’t based in the US (though they do have a branch in Florida).

 

http://www.knowledgegenesis.co.uk/home/what-we-do

http://smartlogisticsinc.com/partnerships/

http://goaleurope.com/2012/02/10/russian-science-put-to-a-commercial-use-real-time-multi-agent-optimization-know-how/

Russia and the rest of Europe are not only doing cutting edge research they are so much more advanced in their logistics and preparedness than the US!  Seems like the US is losing  in the multiagent systems race ;).

Generating human friendly plans?

How can plans that a computer is constantly changing be effectively and without disruption to the workflow be communicated? In a dynamic environment an online planning algorithm could be continuously improving plans.  However, we humans are not that flexible. So, one way is to be able to set a threshold on how much the new plan improves the current one in order to be presented to the humans.  However, this threshold would need to be adaptive to the situations.

Another question is whether we present only the changes to the old plan or the entire new plan? Do we give the humans a choice?

If there are multiple alternative plans do we show them all to the user and let them chose or should the algorithm just pick one for them? Or do we let that as an option to the user?