Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!ai-lab!rice-chex!caroma
From: caroma@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu (Carl R. Manning)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: Re: Stash Collection (Economic models)
Keywords: agoric systems economy markets
Message-ID: <12153@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 1 Dec 90 19:55:54 GMT
References: <12080@life.ai.mit.edu> <-283749995@hpcupt1.cup.hp.com> <1990Nov30.184708.18687@xanadu.com>
Sender: news@ai.mit.edu
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Lines: 65

In article <1990Nov30.184708.18687@xanadu.com> hibbert@xanadu.com (Chris Hibbert) writes:
>thomasw@hpcupt1.cup.hp.com (Thomas Wang) asks:
>>> Is the market economy model applicable to computer programs? [...]
>>> Human beings do this with relative ease.  But [...] programs would
>>> have difficulty dealing with this sort of decision making.  

>>> [...]
>>>              (Everything is an object.)

>[...] most small agents will probably
>form coalitions to have their resources negotiated as a bundle freeing
>the individual objects from the overhead.  Other small objects that
>[or whose owners] don't want to live or die with an unrelated cluster
>will hire an agent that specializes in negotiating for resources.
>Part of the contract would be that the agent would find a way to save
>the object's state when the agent decides to stop spending the
>object's money on computrons.


"Everything is an object" can be a useful viewpoint; as Chris Hibbert
points out, it can lead to ideas of arranging for objects to delegate
complex decisions to business managers or to form coalitions.  But it
also can be a limiting metaphor if you equate objects with people, who
are treated as equals and given the power to make their own decisions.
Economic units (e.g. corporations, businesses, families, individuals,
etc.) also OWN property and have the responsibility for managing and
paying for the resources used by their property; this property can
also be viewed as objects.  Thus, the economic decisions for most small
objects may be made by the economic units which own them, and charges
for resource use by an object can be directed to the owner of the
object rather than to the object itself.  Often these economic units
will be organizations of objects; Carl Hewitt has dubbed these units
ORGs.  However, these ORGs aren't necessarily just large databases and
the like; an information system will be structured into smaller ORGs
where the usefulness of the accounting and management information
outweighs the overhead of keeping it, just as all but the smallest
corporations and companies have internal divisions and groups.

Another thing to point out is that making the economy work doesn't
necessarily require agents with sophisticated human level
intelligence; an economy of agents which make decisions based on price
information using simple heuristics can still realize the benefits of
using local market information.  Note that there is a tradeoff between
intelligence and resource use: trying to use more information
intelligently requires more resources and lengthens reaction time.
Drexler and Miller's "Incentives..." paper gives some examples of
simple heuristic agents participating in markets.  In "Time and Money"
(April 90 Byte) Wayner mentions another system built using simple
heuristics: in experiments with the Spawn operating system, Xerox
people used a simple heuristic where each process received a trickle
of money over time, and bet all its money at each auction.

So yes, I think the market economy model is applicable to computer
programs.  Perhaps you won't see objects like cons cells being treated
as economic units with the responsibility to pay for their own memory,
but it is easier to imagine a small agencies like a hardcopy server,
as well as large transaction systems, managing their resources on the
market.  (e.g., the hardcopy server might purge font caches if memory
became too expensive or paying jobs which used them became scarce...)
This thread started out discussing how to manage stashes of info which
can be purged or compacted if the memory is needed more elsewhere.
The economic model provides a distributed, localized mechanism for
managing that 'needed more' information through prices.

-- CarlManning@ai.mit.edu


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