Another approach to conflict resolution is to use the principle of noncompromise. In order for this to work, a new intermediate level of agents must appear in the Society-of-More hierarchy. "the new APPEARANCE adminstrator is designed to say `more' when the agent TALL is active, to say `less' when the agent THIN is active, and to say nothing at all when something appears both taller and thinner. Then the other new administrator, HISTORY, makes the decision on the basis of what CONFINED says."
This puts the emphasis on control structure, which is highlighted in Minsky's statement of "Papert's Principle: Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based no simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows."
(NB: Control structure is a major theme of Newell and Simon's work on cognitive simulation via production systems. But this stuff here makes me think of hidden units in connectionist models -- adding the new layer of agents is similar to adding a new layer of hidden units to a network. This makes me wonder, a bit, whether hidden units can be viewed as serving a control structure function in a PDP network.)
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