Discussion
Computer Science > Multiagent Systems
measurablefunc: Next up, LLMs as actors & processes in π-calculus.
timcobb: Is it web scale?
measurablefunc: Abstractly? 100%. Realistically? Depends on how many trillions we can get from investors.
robot-wrangler: > Next up, LLMs as actors & processes in π-calculus.You jest, but agents are of course already useful and fairly formal primitives. There's a whole body of research on multi-agent systems that already exists and is even implemented in some model-checkers. It's surprising how little interest that creates in most LLM / AI / ML enthusiasts, who don't seem that interested in using the prior art to propose / study / implement topologies and interaction protocols for the new wave of "agentic".
measurablefunc: That's all nice & well but which protocol & topology will deliver the most dollars from investors?
rishabhjajoriya: Thinking about LLM teams as distributed systems actually makes a lot of sense. Coordination, latency, and failure modes start to look very similar to traditional distributed architectures.
charcircuit: Could it just be that it is happening behind closed doors due to multi agents being part of the secret sauce of post training LLMs.
andai: Ten years ago at my old university we had a course called Multi-Agent Systems. The whole year built up to it: a course in Formal Logic with Prolog, Logic-Based AI (LBAI) with a robot in a block world, also with Prolog, and finally Multi-Agent Systems (MAS).In the MAS course, we used GOAL, which was a system built on top of Prolog. Agents had Goals, Perceptions, Beliefs, and Actions. The whole thing was deterministic. (Network lag aside ;)The actual project was that we programmed teams of bots for a Capture The Flag tournament in Unreal Tournament 3.So it was the most fun possible way to learn the coolest possible thing.The next year they threw out the whole curriculum and replaced it with Machine Learning.
