Evolutionary Testing of Autonomous Software Agents

A system built in terms of autonomous agents may require even greater correctness assurance than one which is merely reacting to the immediate control of its users. Agents make substantial decisions for themselves, so thorough testing is an important consideration. However, autonomy also makes testing harder; by their nature, autonomous agents may react in different ways to the same inputs over time, because, for instance they have changeable goals and knowledge. For this reason, we argue that testing of autonomous agents requires a procedure that caters for a wide range of test case contexts, and that can search for the most demanding of these test cases, even when they are not apparent to the agents’ developers. In this paper, we address this problem, introducing and evaluating an approach to testing autonomous agents that uses evolutionary optimization to generate demanding test cases.

The Bird and its Flight: A Struggle for Freedom in Bulgakov's Master and Margarita

The Russian senior seminar this semester focused on Bulgakov’s famous novel, Master and Margarita. This presentation focuses on one of the themes of the novel, specifically Bulgakov’s use of birds in his work. Birds appear numerous times in Master and Margarita, and it always has a connotation of either a lack of freedom or a recent achievement of this goal. There are even instances in which characters themselves, as they seek freedom from their former oppressive lives, become the “birds” in the novel. This paper is an exploration of bird imagery in the novel.