GRAVITY TWENTY TWO -- Thursday, October 8, 1992

Missed a day, dang it. Oh well. I passed my test, at any rate.

Today's about acclimation, which is very important if you want to understand how agents communicate. Acclimation works pretty much as it does in real life:

"Hey honey, can you get me the hedge clippers?"
"Which ones? The big ones or the small ones?"
"The big ones."
"Where are they?"
"They're on the workshelf, in a drawer."
(from the workshelf) "Which drawer?"
"The one with the green paint drippings on it."
(from the workshelf) "Got it."

As we communicate, we use ambiguous names and need to qualify them. I may be talking about "the bus driver" and you may not know if I'm talking about Ralph from the Honeymooner's (if we'd seen an episode earlier) or the guy who got arrested for a DUI (if we'd seen it on the local news).

Acclimation is the process by which two agents clarify their references.
Recall that each agent has a memory structure called a context. Contexts are filled with Gravity names. When agents talk to one another, they try to supply as little information as possible (just as people do). They assume that the receiving agent can figure out a complete item reference by supplying information from its own context.

A dialog is a communication session between two agents. Item references are often repeated during the same dialog. Once the two agents make it clear which exact items are being referenced, that is, once their individual contexts have acclimated to each other, things proceed more quickly.

Informally, acclimation happens like this:

Agent Harry: "Yo, Sally, Gimme Resume.11"

(Agent Sally checks its context and finds three references to Resume.11)
Agent Sally: "You mean Resume.11 by agent Dork-Meister?"

(Agent Harry checks his context and discovers that its the wrong agent)
Agent Harry: "No, by agent Jerry."

(Agent Sally checks and sees the other two Resume.11 items are by a Jerry)
Agent Sally: "You mean Jerry of ThoughtShop Deadhead?"

(Agent 1 looks and sees that Jerry is indeed part of ThoughtShop Deadhead)
Agent 1: "Yeah."

Agent 2: "Here it comes."

And the item is sent. Note that this example assumes that the two agents are not part of the same ThoughtShop. Things work differently if two agents have a common ground. For one thing, an agent would never request a co-agent to send an item already in its ground. But if two co-agents were talking, they would need to resolve their references to the point where both knew which exact items in the common ground they were each referring to.

Note that acclimation alters the context of the receiving agent so that
when further incomplete names are sent, Jerry and Deadhead are assumed. When communicating large systems, these assumptions save time & confusion.

Tomorrow: systems.

From: Glenn Blank