W11. Learning 04
Today we will learn about communication strategies within and between systems. Different systems have different topological designs, but most advanced systems are distributed to some degree, i.e., computation takes place in more than one area. However, the further apart modules are, the more communication problems can occur.
The swarms we looked at a few lecture ago were very unintelligent: they had very short distance sensing ranges, and they had no onboard memory. Any "memory" that the system as a whole had was encoded directly in the environment. If we allow our agents to have seemingly simple things like memory and long-distance communication, we suddenly enable non-local swarm effects, which starts to look a lot like intelligent behaviour.
Pre-readings and Videos
None for today.
Summary of the Day
TK
Learning Goals
- Be able to articulate the dynamics of message-passing and causality in terms of speed and media.
- Be able to illustrate the impact of boundaries and observability on distributed systems.
- Be able to reason about network topologies at a high-level using generalized examples.