Readings in Distributed Artificial Intelligence

A B

X

0.9 X 0.8

Y 0.8 Y 0.2

FIG.

19. Managers rating bids from prospective contractors.

From a purely local perspective, both of the managers want X as their

contractor; from a more global perspective it may make more sense to have A

'settle' for Y, and give X to B. Yet we cannot in general create the more global

perspective without exchanging what may turn out to be extensive amounts of

information.

The first of the two problems (timing) appears unavoidable given that we

have chosen to deal with the kinds of problems typically attacked in AI,

problems whose total decomposition is not known a priori. In a speech

understanding problem, for instance ...