Markets and Computation: Agoric Open Systems
Mark S. Miller
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center,
3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304
K. Eric Drexler
MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,
545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139
Like all systems involving goals, resources, and
actions, computation can be viewed in economic terms. Computer science has
moved from centralized toward increasingly decentralized models of control and
action; use of market mechanisms would be a natural extension of this
development. The ability of trade and price mechanisms to combine local
decisions by diverse parties into globally effective behavior suggests their
value for organizing computation in large systems.
This paper examines
markets as a model for computation and proposes a framework-agoric
systems-for applying the power of market mechanisms to the software domain.
It then explores the consequences of this model at a variety of levels. Initial
market strategies are outlined which, if used by objects locally, lead to
distributed resource allocation algorithms that encourage adaptive modification
based on local knowledge. If used as the basis for large, distributed systems,
open to the human market, agoric systems can serve as a software publishing and
distribution marketplace providing strong incentives for the development of
reusable software components. It is argued that such a system should give rise
to increasingly intelligent behavior as an emergent property of interactions
among software entities and people.
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