Groups as fictional agents

Fictional Women in Mathematics

This article will argue that the situation for female mathematicians in fiction has improved, but that there is still cause for concern. You may wonder why you should care about this at all since these fictional women are (by definition) not real and therefore unlikely to be dues paying members of the AWM! With this in mind, in addition to providing examples of female mathematicians in literatu...

Mirroring Fictional Others

Fictional Planet Ballardia

The Rock Cycle is a useful pedagogical device. Science-fiction novelist James G. Ballard published a colorful description of a nameless fictional world in 1957 that has an artificially closed Rock Cycle. Were such an anthropogenic cycle instigated for Earth, it would be consistent with James Hutton’s viewpoint on the Earth as a self-repairing machine without an endogenetic end to planetary Geol...

Fictional Game Elements 2016

Gamification has been widely accepted in the HCI community in the last few years. However, the current debate is focused on its short-term consequences, such as effectiveness and usefulness, while its side-effects, long-term criticalities and systemic impacts are rarely raised. This workshop explores the gamification design space from a critical perspective, by using design fictions to help res...

Programming Groups of Rational Agents

In this paper, we consider the problem of effectively programming groups of agents. These groups should capture structuring mechanisms common in multi-agent systems, such as teams, cooperative groups, and organisations. Not only should individual agents be dynamic and evolving, but the groups in which the agents occur must be open, flexible and capable of similar evolution and restructuring. We...