DAI betwixt and between: from 'intelligent agents' to open systems science

Actors are introduced as primitives of concurrency -computations consist of communications between actors, each of which has local information, and must communicate with other agents to access other information. Joint activity can result in conflicts, causing some activities not to be completed; degrees of self reliance and interdependence in activities are discussed. ORGs, organizational structures for large scale work, are an extension of actors, consisting of actors and of smaller ORGs. The passing of messages among the actors which are members of seperate ORGs is most important to computation, and ORG boundaries are explained, along with a mechanism for maintaining them for effective communication. Conflict processing is done by forums, which provide all their information (mod individual filters) to all subscribers; these are used as arenas for negotiation.