[mercury-users] Any recent developments?

[Ralph Becket]

Fergus Henderson wrote on 15 Jul:
> On 15-Jul-1998, Alexander Voinov <avv at isida.ipa.rssi.ru> wrote:
> > Dear All,
> > 
> > Probably I'm too lazy to look at the ftp server, but:
> > 
> > Is there any contributed library for multi-agent programming in Mercury?
> > KQML, KIF, ACL? E.g. CLIPS has such a module: wrapped a C++ package.
> 
> Probably I'm too lazy to look up all those acronyms for myself ;-), but:
> what exactly do you mean by multi-agent programming?
> (A URL or two might help.)

Think I can lend a hand here.

KQML - knowledge query meta/markup language: a protocol for sending
messages between agents (a bit like e-mail headers, but with emphasis
on type of msg and msg content).

KIF - knowledge interchange format: a syntax + some stuff for FOL.

ACL - agent communication language: any language used to communicate
between agents.

Now, I think what Alexander really wants is some way to get agents
(programs) talking to each other.  Isn't there a sockets interface in
the IO library these days?  That should be sufficient to get something
off the ground.

> If by that you mean concurrency, then no, the current Mercury implementation
> doesn't support it.  But we're working on it and I'm hopeful of progress
> in time for the next release.

Cheers,

Ralph

-- 
Ralph Becket  |  rwab1 at cam.sri.com  |  http://www.cam.sri.com/people/becket.html