
V) World:
There are two major claims here.  First, a good setting of the Tileworld
agent depends in large part on the settings of the world (i.e. Tileworld is
a good indicator of performance within an architecture family).  Second,
Tileworld is an adequate testbed for comparing agent architectures (i.e.
Tileworld is a good indicator of performance across architecture families).

V.A) Problems that prohibit comparisons across architecture families:

* "The simulator is designed to minimize noise and preserve fine
distinctions in performance."
* "See the Tileworld testbed as a good basis for comparison of other
agent architectures."
###############
Since limitations on the world itself strongly limit the class of architectures
that can meaningfully be inserted in the environment, it is hard to test an
architectural proposal that is significantly different from the implemented
agent; 
- the world has no sense of elapsed time, 
   

- it has a limited notion of payoff, 
- it has very limited subgoal interaction,
- is effected considerably by noise introduced by randomness.  
- the world lacks meaningful regularities, 
- has no separate notion of `task', 
-  does the agent have a model of the world?

V.B) Problems that prohibit comparisons within an architecture family.

V.C) How Tileworld compares to other geometric real-time simulators.

* "Tileworld exhibits spatial complexity; and it includes tasks of varying
degrees in importance and difficulty.  It is generic, it has a wide
distribution of task values (hole scores) and task difficulty (hole size),
which differentiates it from Phoenix and MICE."

7.  it would be good to compare it to the spatial complexity 
of a REAL geometric simulator.  there's a good one from CMU, 
whose name escapes me, but i can find a reference.  did you find
out anything about phoenix or mice?
(find phoenix reference)

V.D) Proposal to add new knobs.

* "Changing other parameters will be very useful, like size of the space,
distribution of the task value and difficulty, and availability of tiles."

Before introducing new knobs (parameters).  A good understanding of the
utility and effect of the existing knobs is required.  Existing knobs
should be experimented and the degree to which they effect difficulty and
reasoning should be explained.  From the paper, only the agent's act/think
rate and the sophistication of the deliberation mechanism have adequate
explanations of their consequences.  Some results that may be learned from
those experiments are for example: which has a stronger effect on
performance, dynamism or hostility? similarly for variability in utility and
variability in difficulty.  

14.  good.  i think it's important to say what we thing 
a GOOD experimental regime would have been.  it would be 
good to read and consider the drummond and langely paper
in this regard.

V.F) What the characteristics of the simulated world should have been.

16. gotta agree.  this paper has to have some constructive  
work in it too---one thing to do is to think about what 
characteristics a simulated world SHOULD have.  that 
should lead us to some very fundamental thinking about the 
necessary tradeoff between a simple, uniform, generic testbed
and (1) the ability to express a meaningful agent architecture
in it, and (2) the ability to do meaningful experiments. 
our conclusion may well be that it's going to be a tough job
to balance the two, but one shouldn't sacrifice the hard issues
just in order to get nice graphs in the paper.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Agent Architecture:

IV.A) Summary of IRMA architecture from [Bratman et al].



IV.B) How good of an implementation of IRMA is the agent.



IV.C) Think time vs. act time, and how time is implemented.

* "Speed-accuracy trade-off."

The notion of time is alien to the world and is completely defined by the
agent.  So it is very hard to talk about speed when there is no precise
definition of reasoning time and its effect on total performance.
Consequently, it is hard to compare the "speeds" of alternative agent
proposals.  

5.  good.  this deserves emphasis.  at some point we should
say that what he's REALLY trying to get at is a tradeoff
between deliberation and action (at least that's what 
everybody else is getting at) and the way the world is 
set up makes it difficult to talk about time.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Experiments:
0

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Conclusions:

15. "Intend to add limited perception, learning, and intention
coordination(?).  Expect that, as deliberation and planning get more
expensive, filtering will be more important and the intention structure
will involve more complex interactions among intentions."

Filtering will not make sense until then.  

17. The overall goal of the project is an improved understanding of the
relation between agent design and environmental factors.  

Still need to experiment environmental factors.

-------------------------------------------------
Agenda:
5- what agent architectures could be expressed in Tileworld?
