Assignment 03A

In the first part of this assignment, you should think about the logic of a self-organizing system. You should draw diagrams and write the whole logic by which it would work. Here are some guidelines:

• Think about local intelligence and local interactions. Each agent will only "look" at its immediate surroundings and make decisions based on these "encounters". The collective intelligence comes from these local interactions (think ant colonies!)
• Define roles of your agents, or types of agents. Each agent has a set of properties and will react in a certain way when encountering certain other agents. Keep in mind the exponential complexity here: for each agent you should define the action to be taken when it encounters each of the other agents and also agents of the same type (in case there is more than one). So if you have 4 types of agents, you have to think of circa 16 types of interactions
• Think also of passive agents. Obstacles, for example, could be characterized as passive agents: they affect all other agents, but it doesn't react on any way.
• Think of forces of attraction and repulsion, and also on other more complex arrangements (in case one agent encounter a group of other agents combined, for example)

More important, use your imagination. Produce material which could explain for ANYONE about your idea, and post on the blog. Be as thorough as possible!

Please post all until Sunday, so you can have it out of the way the following week, and I can use the other week to prepare some help for you!