Note: This page is historical.

Current pages about Yenta are here. Please look at those pages first.

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.

How agents can find each other

There are many aspects to how one agent is supposed to find another. For instance, when an agent is just starting out, it must bootstrap itself by finding at least one other agent which is part of some community. In this case, which agent it chooses is generally immaterial, since it has to start somewhere.

On the other hand, once an agent is part of some community, it must find the right other agent(s) with which to communicate. Simply finding all other agents does not help, since part of the problem we are trying to solve is the quadratic (or worse) rate of growth if every agent must know about every other.


Lenny Foner
Last modified: Wed Dec 7 20:51:36 1994