Speculative Computation by Abduction under Incomplete Communication Environments
Ken Satoh, Katsumi Inoue, Koji Iwanuma, and Chiaki Sakama
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on
Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS'00), IEEE Computer Society, pages 263-270, 2000.
Abstract
In this paper, we present a method of problem solving in multi-agent
systems when communication between agents is not guaranteed. Under
incomplete communication environments such as the Internet, the
communication might fail and a reply might be significantly
delayed. Therefore, research of problem solving under incomplete
communication is very important.
To solve the problem, we propose a method using abduction.
Abduction is a way of reasoning where some hypothesis will
be used to complement unknown information. The idea is as
follows. When communication is delayed or failed, then we use a
default hypothesis as a tentative answer and continue
computation. When some response is obtained, we check consistency of
the response and the current computation. If the response is
consistent, then we continue the current computation; else if the
response is inconsistent, we seek an alternative computation. This way
of computation is called speculative computation, since
computation using a tentative answer would lead to a significant
advantage if it succeeds.
In this paper, we restrict our attention to a master-slave multi-agent
system and propose an implementation of speculative computation and
show that abduction plays an important role in speculative computation.
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