Fig 1 - uploaded by Mark Burgess
Content may be subject to copyright.
Serial composition of a promise and a coordination promise. The dashed arrow is implied by the C(b) promise.
Source publication
Can the whole be greater than the sum of its parts? The phenomenon of emergence claims that it can. Autonomics suggests that emergence can be har-nessed to solve problems in self-management and behavioural regulation without human involvement, but the definitions of these key terms are unclear. Using promise theory, and the related operator theory...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... of the strengths of promise theory is that it defines groups and roles as empirical observables, rather than as necessarily pre-design features [2,6]. For this is it important to be able to compare agents using an impartial third party. The coordination promise is used for this (see fig. 1). The reduction rule for coordination promises for the case in which n 1 promises n 2 that it will coordinate on the matter of b, given that n 2 promises n 3 b follows. The symbol "⊗" is used to signify the composition of these ...
Similar publications
p>This paper introduces a framework aimed at improving the lifestyle of individuals engaged in health self-management programs by providing them with valuable and actionable insights derived from their personal health data. The framework is designed to autonomously discover, optimize, and deliver these insights to the participants. To evaluate the...
p>This paper introduces a framework aimed at improving the lifestyle of individuals engaged in health self-management programs by providing them with valuable and actionable insights derived from their personal health data. The framework is designed to autonomously discover, optimize, and deliver these insights to the participants. To evaluate the...
Citations
... A hypothesis of promise theory is that one may define a notion of force for agents, which is attractive when there is economic advantage, and repulsive for economic disadvantage 19 . The formation of super-agents thus comes about, for economic reasons [29], by the value of collaboration. If the promises are unconditional, superagents will be localized. ...
... They are defined semantically, by labelling of community membership. The simple explanation [6, 9, 29] is that a city is defined to be that collection of agents that mutually promise to be members of the city, and that are accepted as such by the city authorities. In practice, the population must register as residents, and they receive promises of services (including tax collection). ...
The study of spacetime, and its role in understanding functional systems has received little attention in information science. Recent work, on the origin of universal scaling in cities and biological systems, provides an intriguing insight into the functional use of space, and its measurable effects. Cities are large information systems, with many similarities to other technological infrastructures, so the results shed new light indirectly on the scaling the expected behaviour of smart pervasive infrastructures and the communities that make use of them. Using promise theory, I derive and extend the scaling laws for cities to expose what may be extrapolated to technological systems. From the promise model, I propose an explanation for some anomalous exponents in the original work, and discuss what changes may be expected due to technological advancement .
... A hypothesis of promise theory is that one may define a notion of force for agents, which is attractive when there is economic advantage, and repulsive for economic disadvantage 19 . The formation of super-agents thus comes about, for economic reasons [29], by the value of collaboration. If the promises are unconditional, superagents will be localized. ...
... They are defined semantically, by labelling of community membership. The simple explanation [6, 9, 29] is that a city is defined to be that collection of agents that mutually promise to be members of the city, and that are accepted as such by the city authorities. In practice, the population must register as residents, and they receive promises of services (including tax collection). ...
The study of spacetime, and its role in understanding functional systems has received little attention in information science. Recent work, on the origin of universal scaling in cities and biological systems, provides an intriguing insight into the functional use of space, and its measurable effects. Cities are large information systems, with many similarities to other technological infrastructures, so the results shed new light indirectly on the scaling the expected behaviour of smart pervasive infrastructures and the communities that make use of them. Using promise theory, I derive and extend the scaling laws for cities to expose what may be extrapolated to technological systems. From the promise model, I propose an explanation for some anomalous exponents in the original work, and discuss what changes may be expected due to technological advancement.
... Thus, semantics constrain promise bodies to a set of linguistic atoms (morphemes) which are discrete. In nature, we see this in everything from gene codons, to cells and organisms, to Chinese ideograms 6 Figure 4: Body parts or linguistic atoms of intent may be used as a spanning set for the body of any promise in a region. This is like a coordinate system of intent. ...
... These are well known in information theory. 6 One can speculate about the reason for the size of discrete patterns used to convey meaning. Dynamical scales will ultimately place limits of the comprehension of an agent. ...
... The impact of a promise is defined through its binding strength, or effective coupling constant. In earlier work, I defined the notion of a trajectory for an agent, and the corresponding notion of a generalized force, obeying Newtonian semantics [6,7]. Intuitively, one expects a force to be something that impacts an agent's trajectory ...
Using Promise Theory as a calculus, I review how to define agency in
a scalable way, for the purpose of understanding semantic
spacetimes. By following simple scaling rules, replacing individual
agents with `super-agents' (sub-spaces), it is shown how agency can
be scaled both dynamically and semantically.
The notion of occupancy and tenancy, or how space is used and filled
in different ways, is also defined, showing how spacetime can be
shared between independent parties, both by remote association and
local encapsulation. I describe how to build up dynamic and semantic
continuity, by joining discrete individual atoms and molecules of
space into quasi-continuous lattices.
... We follow the initial development of [7, 8, 10] for an approach to a theory of promises with a principled emphasis on agent autonomy. A simple notation for promises, involving four components: a promiser, a promisee, a promise type, and a promise 1 The role of autonomy for agents acting upon the reception of decision outcomes has not been brought into focus in my work [1] on outcome oriented decision taking and in these papers the possibility that decision outcomes imply obligations for other agents is left open. ...
... Contemplating promise dynamics below will lead to the identification of a number of features that may be attached to promises on top of the four components mentioned above. This in turn leads us to the specification of a variety of promise statement notations extending the expressive power of the base notation from [7, 8] and [10]. At a closer inspection promise dynamics, as well as imposition dynamics, and the dynamics of other directionals is dominated by levels of mutual trust between agents and the design and implementation of trust maintenance functionality. ...
... In its simplest form (called ground form), p[π: b]q, a promise statement conveys (the name of) a promiser (p) a promise type π a promise body (b), and a promisee (q). These promise statements, though with a more figurative notation with an arrow between promiser and promise and promise type and body as a subscript for that arrow, have been introduced and used extensively in [7, 8, 10]. In this notation p[ Subject fragmentation: Upon its issuing a promise fragments over a community of agents, that is each agent in scope of the promise becomes the carrier of a fragment of it. ...
Promises, impositions, proposals, predictions, and suggestions are
categorized as voluntary co-operational methods. The class of voluntary
co-operational methods is included in the class of so-called directionals.
Directionals are mechanisms supporting the mutual coordination of autonomous
agents.
Notations are provided capable of expressing residual fragments of
directionals. An extensive example, involving promises about the suitability of
programs for tasks imposed on the promisee is presented. The example
illustrates the dynamics of promises and more specifically the corresponding
mechanism of trust updating and credibility updating. Trust levels and
credibility levels then determine the way certain promises and impositions are
handled.
The ubiquity of promises and impositions is further demonstrated with two
extensive examples involving human behaviour: an artificial example about an
agent planning a purchase, and a realistic example describing technology
mediated interaction concerning the solution of pay station failure related
problems arising for an agent intending to leave the parking area.
... In promise theory, emergent behaviour is explained by noting the indistinguishability of certain collections promises from others. Without getting into details, we say that a system has emergent properties if it seems to promise something, from the viewpoint of an external observer who in scope, that in fact it does not explicitly promise, see Burgess & Fagernes (2007a) In the same way, it is possible for a knowledge model to make no explicit design promises about category and yet still form a structure that appears to cluster around certain 'attractor topics' in the manner of a hierarchy. The spontaneous formation of hierarchies is a relatively well-known phenomenon in network science, see Newman et al. (2001); Watts (1999) and is related to the 'small worlds' phenomenon. ...
... An account of how promises arrive, persist and are removed again is forthcoming. Some work has already been done in this area, however[11, 12] but scope for embellishment is vast, as is the number applications for the concept of promises. In the latter reference, the matter of organization is related to promises, as a form of cooperation between individuals or autonomous agents. ...
We discuss for the concept of promises within a framework that can be applied
to either humans or technology. We compare promises to the more established
notion of obligations and find promises to be both simpler and more effective
at reducing uncertainty in behavioural outcomes.
... However this is a belief which is based on the widely held assumption that program design dictates behavioural outcome. This is far from clear, as we show in ref. [1]. ...
Distributed systems that interact have neither intrinsically common knowledge nor consistent models for interacting with other systems. This relativ-ity or even inconsistency presents a fundamental limitation to autonomic collab-oration. In this paper, we define knowledge using the well-understood concept of information and show how promise theory simply describes the required condi-tions for coordinated cooperation and interaction in a distributed system.
... However this is a belief which is based on the widely held assumption that program design dictates behavioural outcome. This is far from clear, as we show in ref. [1]. ...
Distributed systems that interact have neither intrinsically common knowledge nor consistent models for interacting with other systems. This relativ-ity or even inconsistency presents a fundamental limitation to autonomic collab-oration. In this paper, we define knowledge using the well-understood concept of information and show how promise theory simply describes the required condi-tions for coordinated cooperation and interaction in a distributed system.
... Let us define a valuation of a promise known as the outcome by the notation: o(a 1 b → a 2 ). The outcome returns a value in [0, 1] where 0 means not-kept and 1 means kept. Intermediate values can be used for any purpose, such as statistical compliance. ...
We begin with two axioms: that system behaviour is an empirical phenomenon and that organization is a form of behaviour. We derive laws and characterizations of behaviour for generic systems. In our view behaviour is not determined by internal mech- anisms alone but also by environmental forces. Systems may 'announce' their internal expectations by making "promises" about their intended behaviour. We formalize this idea using promise theory to develop an reductionist understanding of how system behaviour and organization emerges from basic rules of interaction. Starting with the assumption that all system components are autonomous entities, we derive basic laws of influence betwe en them. Organization is then understood as persistent patterns in the trajectories of the system. We show how hierarchical structure emerges from the need to offload the cost of observational calibration: it is not a design requirement for control, rat her it begins as an economic imperative which then throttles itself through poor scalability and leads to clustered tree structures, with a trade-off between depth and width.
The framework of promise theory offers an alternative way of understanding programming models, especially in distributed systems. We show that promise theory can express some familiar constructs and resolve some problems in program interface design, using fewer and simpler concepts than the Unified Modelling Language (UML).
