Birmingham

We are interested in mixed human and agent systems in the context of networked computer games. These games require a fully distributed computer system. State changes must be transmitted by network messages subject to possibly significant latency. The system then is composed of agents' mutually inconsistent views of the world state that cannot be reconciled because no single agent's state is naturally more correct than another's. The paper discusses the implications of this inconsistency for distributed AI systems. While our example is computer games, we argue the implications affect a much larger class of human/AI problems.