Creating Spaces

A Space is where agents may communicate and interact with each other. Agents are instantiated within a space when added.

Spaces define the underlying communication transport used for messaging. Agency currently implements two Space types:

• LocalSpace - which connects agents within the same application.
• AMQPSpace - which connects agents across a network using an AMQP server.

Using LocalSpace

LocalSpace is the more basic of the two. It connects agents within the same python application using interprocess communication (IPC).

Instantiating a LocalSpace, like other spaces, is as simple as:

space = LocalSpace()
space.add(Host, "Host")
...

The above example would instantiate the Host agent within the LocalSpace instance, allowing any other agents added to the space to communicate with it.

Using AMQPSpace

AMQPSpace may be used for building applications that allows agent communication across multiple hosts in a network.

To run an AMQPSpace across multiple hosts, you would separate your agents into multiple applications. Each application would be configured to use the same AMQP server.

For example, the following would separate the Host agent into its own application:

if __name__ == '__main__':

    # Create a space
    space = AMQPSpace()

    # Add a host agent to the space
    space.add(Host, "Host")

And the following would separate the ChattyAI agent into its own application:

if __name__ == '__main__':

    # Create a space
    space = AMQPSpace()

    # Add a simple HF based chat agent to the space
    space.add(ChattyAI, "Chatty",
              model="EleutherAI/gpt-neo-125m")

Then you can run both applications at the same time, and the agents will be able to connect and communicate with each other over AMQP. This approach allows you to scale your agents beyond a single host.

See the example application for a full working example.

Configuring AMQP Connectivity

By default, the AMQPSpace class will read the following environment variables and will otherwise use default settings.

AMQP_HOST
AMQP_PORT
AMQP_USERNAME
AMQP_PASSWORD
AMQP_VHOST

You may also customize the options if you provide your own AMQPOptions object when instantiating an AMQPSpace. For example:

space = AMQPSpace(
    amqp_options=AMQPOptions(
        hostname="localhost",
        port=5672,
        username="guest",
        password="guest",
        virtual_host="/",
        use_ssl=True,
        heartbeat=60))

Instantiating and Destroying Spaces

Space instances manage a number of resources during their lifetime.

To destroy a Space, simply call its destroy method. This will clean up all resources used by the space, along with any agents within the space.

Spaces also support the context manager syntax for convenience. For example:

with LocalSpace() as space:
    space.add(Host, "Host")
    ...

This form will automatically clean up Space related resources upon exit of the with block.