A complex-systems simulation approach to evaluating plan-based and reactive trading strategies

Abstract

Should we plan for the future or should we react to the situation in which we find ourselves? Over the past decade this question has been increasingly asked in a number of academic disciplines and practitioner fields. It has arisen in the context of the design of autonomous systems, such as robots and software agents, in which the notion that systems based on reaction can achieve complex and robust behaviors has been argued forcefully by a group of workers (Brooks 1986, Agre and Chapman 1987, Agre 1988, Brooks 1991b) challenging the established planning-based paradigm (Fikes and Nilson 1971, Raphael 1976) that has proved to be computationally expensive and brittle (Brooks 1991a).