So for the past two weeks I've had a visitor at work, who I shall call NT (since I'm so great at thinking up pseudonyms). He's a PhD student from the Netherlands who has invented a programming language for organisations of agents. I was in favour of calling this language Orwell (the original paper describes them as Orwellian Agents) but NT opted ( Read more... )

Things I learned today

• The reason our code model checks sooo slowly, despite having a relatively conservative number of states, is that JPF (Java Pathfinder - a model checker) has an exponential slowdown based on the number of objects in the program. Our program has a lot of objects.
• Fortunately the JPF developers intend to fix this by the end of ( Read more... )

Several people now have told me these posts are entirely jibberish however I want to document the progress of our thought on the project. It's all under the cut but I don't suggest you read it unless you are actually interested in agents, programming and/or model checking.

( And now the science bit )