On social laws for artificial agent societies: off-line design

We are concerned with the utility of social laws in a computational environment, laws which guarantee the successful coexistence of multiple programs and programmers. In this paper we are interested in the off-line design of social laws, where we as designers must decide ahead of time on useful social laws. In the first part of this paper we suggest the use of social laws in the domain of mobile robots, and prove analytic results about the usefulness of this approach in that setting. In the second part of this paper we present a general model of social law in a computational system, and investigate some of its properties. This includes a definition of the basic computational problem involved with the design of multi-agent systems, and an investigation of the automatic synthesis of useful social laws in the framework of a model which refers explicitly to social laws.