The Infantilizing Nature of Technophobia: A Matter of Will

Excerpt on Multi-Agent Planning

Planning is important to an agent because its current and upcoming choices of actions can intentionally establish, or accidentally undo, the conditions that later actions depend upon to reach desirable states of the world. Hence, planning in single-agent systems is…

Note on Origins of Threading

Interesting bit of history there, though not surprising to anyone having to deal with GUI programming in languages like Java.

It is common in modern systems to provide capability for a sort of miniprocess, known as a thread. A thread represents a piece…

Notes on Agent-Based and Object Oriented Approaches

Object-oriented systems consist of modules that are able to communicate with each other and have explicit, individual means to respond to incoming messages (Shoham, 1993). Integrating software agents within object-oriented methodologies may…

Virtualization Notes

Have found virtualization fairly crucial to doing research with software that doesn’t port to my base computer.

Virtualization creates an important illusion. The virtualization mechanism makes it appear that each virtual machine has the computer system entirely to…

Simplicity and Complexity

Unfortunately, as a society we tend to regard “complex” and “intelligent” as words that go together. In actuality, intelligent solutions are often the simplest ones. Furthermore, it is the simplest solutions that are often the hardest to find. Most of the algorithms in this book are…

Quote about Bot Programming

With a mobile robot, however, the input combinations change every time it runs a path. Nothing stays constant in the physical world, and nothing looks the same twice in a row. So nearly infinite are the combination of stimuli to which a sensor-based robot may be exposed that its…

Note from Psychology of Computer Programming

We often find material in programs that might be accounted for under one of the above categories but is really present because of the history of the development of the program. For example, once the SUM function is changed to an arithmetic generic…