ON SOCIAL LAWS FOR ARTIFICIAL AGENT SOCIETIES - OFF-LINE DESIGN

We are concerned with the utility of social laws in a computational en vironment, laws which guarantee the successful coexistence of multiple programs and programmers. In this paper we are interested in the off- line design of social laws, where we as designers must decide ahead of time on useful social laws. In the first part of this paper we sugges t the use of social laws in the domain of mobile robots, and prove ana lytic results about the usefulness of this approach in that setting, I n the second part of this paper we present a general model of social l aw in a computational system, and investigate some of its properties. This includes a definition of the basic computational problem involved with the design of multi-agent systems, and an investigation of the a utomatic synthesis of useful social laws in the framework of a model w hich refers explicitly to social laws.