Ch 16: Multi-Agent Systems Architecture - Intermediate¶
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Chapter 16: Multi-Agent Systems — Notebook 02 (Coordination & Consensus)¶
With agents that can talk, the question becomes who does what and how do they agree. We implement the Contract-Net Protocol for allocation and gossip averaging plus voting for consensus.
What you'll learn¶
| Topic | Section |
|---|---|
| Contract-Net: announce, bid, award | §1 |
| Greedy vs optimal allocation | §2 |
| Gossip consensus and convergence | §3 |
| Majority voting and its failure modes | §4 |
Time estimate: 3.5 hours
Key concepts¶
- Contract-Net Protocol — a manager announces a task, agents bid, the best bid wins.
- Bid — a self-reported cost; honest bids make greedy allocation near-optimal.
- Gossip consensus — local averaging that converges to the global mean on a connected graph.
- Voting — cheap aggregation, but vulnerable to correlated errors among agents.
Contract-Net turns allocation into a simple auction; gossip averaging reaches consensus with only local communication; voting aggregates cheaply but assumes independent errors. Coordination is where multi-agent value — and risk — concentrates.
Run the full notebook in the chapter folder for code and outputs.
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