Controlling agent societies with Ruby: Rich Kilmer and Dana Moore

In his talk Controlling and Testing Distributed Systems with Ruby, Rich Kilmer shared details of a DARPA-funded project he's been working on for about a year and a half. His team has built up a rich set of "control surfaces" -- in Ruby -- for a cluster of 150-odd Linux machines that run large-scale simulations of military exercises. The simulation platform is Cougaar (Cognitive Agent Architecture), an open-source project written in Java. The Ruby-based system that controls and tests the Cougaar-based "agent societies" is called ACME.

Afterward I caught up with Rich and his sponsor, Dana Moore, a senior scientist with BBN, and we talked more about the role of dynamic languages in general, and Ruby in particular. Here's the interview.

Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/07/29.html#a1051