Getting Up to Speed on Multi-Agent Systems, Part 2: The Vocabulary

If you try to read multi-agent systems papers without the vocabulary, you will get nowhere. The field has settled on a shared set of words for the pieces of a system, and every paper now slots into those categories even when it pretends to be doing something novel. This post is about those words. Once you know them, you can read any paper in the field and know what it is and isn’t claiming. Getting Up to Speed on MAS Part 1. The LandscapePart 2. The Vocabulary (you are here) Part 3. Wave 1: Can Agents Coordinate At All? (publishes April 26) Part 4. Wave 2: Why It Breaks (publishes April 27) Part 5. Debate, State, and Coordination (publishes April 28) Part 6. Verification Patterns (publishes April 29) Part 7. Benchmarks and What They Miss (publishes April 30) Part 8. Open Questions (publishes May 1) Three surveys have done the work of consolidating the vocabulary. Each one cuts the space slightly differently, but together they give you the conceptual toolkit. Tran et al.: Actors,…