Knowledge Preparation

In this paper we tackle the issue of how a trace from a completed problem-solving episode is prepared before it is stored in collective memory. There are at least three important reasons why trace data must be prepared before it is stored in collective memory.

Data may be bad.

Independent agents are unpredictable. Time constraints can lead to inefficiencies in the plan for an activity. For these reasons, activity traces can reflect inefficient patterns of agent activity.

Data may be too detailed.

Many details are irrelevant. Reasoning about the data, to improve and reuse it, can be simplified by removing detail.

Data may contain multiple ideas.

A single trace may be used to generate a large set of hypotheses about action sequences that represent regularities in cooperation between agents for a given domain. Each hypothesis is a segment of a trace that accomplishes a set of goals. Over the generations of problem-solving, certain hypotheses, saved in collective memory, will be more useful than others.