Are Multi-Agent Systems just hype?

I am a research professor who has published many articles in the Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Conference (AAMAS): the main vehicle for multiagent research.

MAS is a term used by researchers (coined around 1995) that refers to algorithms and methods for organizing teams of autonomous agents. Researchers in MAS have developed algorithms for Robot soccer (see Robocup), coordinating autonomous robot rovers (as in Mars rovers), distributed allocation of resources (who does which task), and many other domains.

I don't see that there is any "hype" as you describe. You can read all the papers in past conferences and each one clearly states what the author tried to accomplish, how he tried it, and what the results were. I do not know of anyone making silly claims about the power of these techniques: they are all just algorithms (isn't everything). No magic here.

The question

do you think that we can already achieve everything MAS has to offer but with simple more elegant solutions?

is incorrect in that, if you can solve a MAS problem with a simple and more elegant solution, your solution is now a MAS solution!

MAS is a problem domain, along with the solutions we found so far. If you find a better solution then, awesome, publish it and join the MAS community.

As an aside, I see this confusion often. Journeymen programmers don't realize that research communities are (usually) defined by the problem they work on, not a solution approach.

I disagree that MAS is a problem domain. MAS is a design pattern that allows you to solve problems in many domains and as you know there are many design patterns out there that can help us solve problems. A lot of the algorithms that are used in MAS research are from machine learning, optimisation, general AI but are applied in that context. As for AAMAS yes we all have access to its papers after all journeymen programmers can search google scholar too.

Dimitris 2010-09-21 07:58:43

Obviously when coordinating multiple physical agents (like in the soccer team example), you automatically have this problem setting. But I've seen people using multiple agent approaches for problems which don't expose a natural partition into several acting entities. They use it as a software architecture. I think this is rather silly.

ziggystar 2010-09-21 08:00:00

MAS is not a "design pattern". A design pattern is a very specific thing (read "Design Patterns" the book). Of course, one can write papers about design patterns for building MASs: http://www.springerlink.com/content/bc32d3lda58rfxaj/

Jose M Vidal 2010-09-24 19:24:30

ziggystar- yes, I also think its silly when people try to view an inherently centralized problem as a MAS, but, you know, when you have a hammer the whole world looks like a nail.

Jose M Vidal 2010-09-24 19:27:45

In section 1.1 of the Design Patterns book the author points out: "Point of view affects one's interpretation of what is and isn't a pattern. One person's pattern can be another person's primitive building block". So it is all down to interpretation and application domain. For your domain you probably think of MAS as something else.

Dimitris 2010-10-05 13:06:42

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Are Multi-Agent Systems just hype?

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