Man and Superman: Human Limitations, Innovation, and Emergence in Resource Competition

This conference is devoted to the theme of the design, prediction, and control of collectives. Many of the collectives that we are implicitly concerned with (and for good reason) are collectives composed of software agents or combinations of software and hardware agents. Collectives of agents that remotely gather information from distant planets and then transmit that information to Earth are one example. Of interest to the military are collectives of small, cheap sensors distributed on a battlefield or in a city that measure some aspect of local conditions and then relay that information to a central repository near a command center. Another example is a collection of sensors and actuators that control the flow of oil or electricity through a complex network by sensing local conditions and responding to them. One common architecture for the interaction of these local agents is through some sort of analogy with economic systems. Here it is supposed that the local agents compete for some scarce resource (bandwidth in the case of agents whose job it is to transmit information, or fluid pressure in the case of those agents whose job it is to regulate oil flow), possibly by a bidding mechanism or by some other strategic architecture that rewards agents for “buying low” or “selling high.”