purplecat

So for the past two weeks I've had a visitor at work, who I shall call NT (since I'm so great at thinking up pseudonyms). He's a PhD student from the Netherlands who has invented a programming language for organisations of agents. I was in favour of calling this language Orwell (the original paper describes them as Orwellian Agents) but NT opted for the rather more prosaic OOPL (Organisation Oriented Programming Language). Somehow, last year at AAMAS, I managed to convince NT's second supervisor that my AIL framework was the obvious implementation platform for this language and we arranged for NT to come to Liverpool to implement it.

Cue much frantic manual writing; OK, some half-hearted manual writing which after about six months' effort resulted in me emailing 94 entirely unproof-read pages to the poor lamb, these representing about 3/4 of a manual. He was remarkably polite about this.

I have been asserting confidently in papers for at least a year that it is easier to implement a language interpreter in my framework than it is to attach a model checker to an existing language (the purpose of the framework being to let you model check your agent programs). So I really shouldn't have been as pleasantly surprised as I was that we managed to write an intepreter for OOPL inside a week. This week included us breaking Windows (so support had to scrub NT's account and do a fresh install) and my frantic attendance at the Automated Reasoning Workshop which was inconsiderately scheduled in Liverpool during the second two days of NT's stay.

We spent this week trying to get the model checker to work and write a parser. In both endeavours we suffered at the hands of other people's tools. The model checker, java pathfinder, is developed at NASA and they've broken it (fortunately, after some messing about, NT and I got our hands on an old version). Meanwhile I struggled to learn to use a parser generator - time taken to work out how to use the tool: two and a half days, time taken to actually write the parser: one day. TBH, if I'd known it was that easy to write parsers I'd have written some long ago rather than assuming they were horrible scary things best steered well clear of.

So all in all a busy but rewarding two weeks.

Despite being full, the powers that be have managed squeeze another person into my office. Who promptly revealed his evil nature by introducing me to Desktop Tower Defence. I have just managed to complete the medium level without letting any creeps escape.

For those worried about the way we are spending your tax money, I hasten to add that I have also squished several bugs this week, implemented communication, and worked out how to get my agent threads to wait. Next week I will try to increase the expressivity of the property specification language. I also went to a workshop on how to get grants from EPSRC but I can see you may not think your taxes well spent in finding out how to get more of you tax money to spend.

So today we had a productive project meeting in which we realised that large parts of our approach were probably wrong. While this doesn't mean all the work I've done in the past year designing and implementing the AIL agent programming language was pointless its going to be put to rather different uses than originally intended and in a much simplified form.

Meanwhile, if it works, the new solution we've got for the problem we are supposed to be addressing is going to be much simpler and far more elegant than AIL. I'm not terribly sorry to be losing AIL, despite the work, since it was beginning to look like something of an unweildy behemoth and the new solution is largely my idea but I do feel incredibly exhausted and, frankly, like I've drunk too much coffee (can't think what the cause of that could be).

Possibly foolishly I've said I will produce a prototype for the new solution by next Friday (this being a reflection of how simple it really will be if it works). Watch this space.

I spent the first 3 months on this job designing AIL * - a low level BDI programming languages. Then I wrote a paper about the design and got sent to Hawaii.

I have also spent some time implementing AIL using the Maude Rewriting Logic. Today the first ever AIL agent executed - it wanted to pick something up, it had a plan to pick something up, and it did so (meaning it changed its beliefs so it believed it picked something up, it didn't actually pick something up). You heard it here first folks!!!

* short for Agent Infrastructure Layer. Since one of the other languages we are interested in is an interpreter for AgentSpeak called Jason (which has a painting of the golden fleece as a logo) I briefly considered trying to change the name so the acronym was GRAIL and then going on an Arthurian/Mythology theme. However my boss's eyes rather glazed over at that point so I thought it best to leave well alone.