[FRIAM] ** reminder ** On Actors and Agents: an informal discussion with Dale Schumacher

[Stephen Guerin]

** reminder **
** today at noon **

Dale Schumacher and Dave West

TITLE: On Actors and Agents: an informal discussion with Dale Schumacher and
Dave West

TIME: Thur, February 28 @ 12:00p
LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room

Lunch at El Tesoro after discussion

ABSTRACT: Dale has an intense interest in massively parallel and "agent" based
modeling and has been working on some ideas about implementation and frameworks
for such modeling based on the Actor model developed by Hewitt.  Actors, Agents,
and Objects can be seen as sharing the same origin myth / metaphor - autonomous
intelligent virtual computers - but represent three different approaches to
implementing that metaphor. 

Actors have made the least headway in capturing the imagination of ABM'ers but
Dale believes they might offer advantages that the other approaches do not.  He
also has some interesting - low level, close to the machine - ideas about
implementation that might contribute to more efficient and elegant ABM
frameworks.