Yenta is still under active development, but this particular page is not. If you're interested in current research papers about Yenta, or obtaining a copy of Yenta, please start here instead. This page is one of many that were written in late 1994 and early 1995, and are being preserved here for historical purposes. If you're viewing this page, you probably found it via an old link or are interested in the history of how Yenta came to be. These pages have not been actively maintained since 1995, so you'll find all sorts of older descriptions which may not match the current system, citations to old papers and old results, and so forth. |
Unfortunately, many applications for agents in which agents share information cannot assume that these techniques will work. Agents that are useful for matchmaking, for instance, will almost certainly need to know a great deal of personal information, especially if they get their knowledge from tactics such as scanning the user's mail; even accidental leakage of such information could be problematic.
Finally, mistakes can and do happen, even in the absence of malevolence. Sometimes, such mistakes are practically indistinguishable from true malevolence. An assumption of benevolence is often no protection against typical denials of service, whether part of an attack or not.
Lenny Foner Last modified: Wed Dec 7 20:51:51 1994