Phase 16
Multi-Agent and Swarms
Phase 16: Multi-Agent and Swarms. 25 hands-on lessons building AI from first principles in the browser. Free reading; graded exercises and certificate with lifetime access.
- Why Multi-Agent?
- Heritage of FIPA-ACL and Speech Acts
- Communication Protocols
- The Multi-Agent Primitive Model
- Supervisor / Orchestrator-Worker Pattern
- Hierarchical Architecture and Its Failure Mode
- Society of Mind and Multi-Agent Debate
- Role Specialization — Planner, Critic, Executor, Verifier
- Parallel / Swarm / Networked Architectures
- Group Chat and Speaker Selection
- Handoffs and Routines — Stateless Orchestration
- A2A — The Agent-to-Agent Protocol
- Shared Memory and Blackboard Patterns (graded)
- Consensus and Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Agents (graded)
- Voting, Self-Consistency, and Debate Topology (graded)
- Negotiation and Bargaining (graded)
- Generative Agents and Emergent Simulation
- Theory of Mind and Emergent Coordination
- Swarm Optimization for LLMs (PSO, ACO) (graded)
- MARL — MADDPG, QMIX, MAPPO
- Agent Economies, Token Incentives, Reputation (graded)
- Production Scaling — Queues, Checkpoints, Durability
- Failure Modes — MAST, Groupthink, Monoculture, Cascading Errors
- Evaluation and Coordination Benchmarks
- Case Studies and the 2026 State of the Art