VIRTUAL INTELLIGENCE

Virtual Intelligence names the development of distributed problem solvers over the World Wide Web (WWW). The traditional approach of research in Distributed Artificial Intelligence is to regard the problem solver as a distributed but centrally designed system, made up by basic and relatively autonomous components which cooperate toward the achievement of a common goal. An alternative approach are multi-agent architectures within which the problem solver is atomized into a population of radically autonomous agents with no provision of a shared goal or any form central design. Virtual Intelligence provides, in some sense, the intelligent infrastructure to develop distributed intelligent systems over the WWW, no matter the model of distributed computation they choose to adopt. The challenge here is to transform the WWW into the ecosystem within which any kind of intelligent system can leverage on the resources provided by the WWW and interact with other systems. The talk will outline the framework of Virtual Intelligence and it will illustrate it through the description of a WWW-based Truth Maintenance System and the dissection of a Virtual Intelligence Server.