This is the second entry in my series of articles about my experiences with AI, in and out of the classroom at UNH.

I have been doing some thinking about possible projects, and what I might feel like working on at the end of the year concerning artificial intelligence.  One of the most interesting areas of technology for me is the idea of distributed processing.  I firmly believe that many, many processors working in harmony to solve a problem is the future of computing.  The benefits of more hands working on any particular problem are obvious, but so are the drawbacks.  How do you synchronize tens to hundreds of nodes so that no work is repeated?

While we have not discussed in class any intelligent ways of dealing with this problem of many agents working on the same problem without repeating work, I felt as though this was certainly within the realm of artificial intelligence.  I did a little searching to see if I could discover the applications of AI to this problem.

And I found some interesting results!  I was less interested in artificial intelligence in high school because I felt it was too abstract to be of any use, but if I had known better and done my research, I may have ended up paying more attention to my UMASS Amherst acceptance letter, if only to see the MAS Lab in action.  Founded in 1968, they have published a great many papers concerning the many uses of AI to control many hands all working on the same project.  Perhaps most interesting to me is their ANTs project, which created some very interesting Autonomous Negotiating Teams.  One of the coolest aspects of AI, to me, is definitely autonomy.  And to pair autonomy with my interest in control systems made me pretty much pre-destined to write about ANTs!  Give the project a read and check out all their other projects if you have an interest in that stuff.