Posit spaces

Peter McBurney, Simon Parsons
2003 Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - AAMAS '03  
What distinguishes e-commerce from ordinary commerce? What distinguishes it from distributed computation? In this paper we propose a performative theory of e-commerce, drawing on speech act theory, in which e-commerce exchanges are promises of future commercial actions, whose real-world meanings are constructed jointly and incrementally. We then define a computational model for this theory, called Posit Spaces, along with the syntax and semantics for an agent interaction protocol, the Posit
more » ... es Protocol or PSP. This protocol enables participants in a multi-agent commercial interaction to propose, accept, modify and revoke joint commitments. Our work integrates three strands of prior research: the theory of Tuple Spaces in distributed computation; formal dialogue games from argumentation theory; and the study of commitments in multi-agent systems.
doi:10.1145/860575.860675 dblp:conf/atal/McBurneyP03 fatcat:yhottmr5unbt7dbmzjoxjotq3y