TP31; Trust is an important aspect of the design and analysis of securedistributed sy stems. It is often used informally to designate those portions of a system that must function correctly in order to achieve the desired outcome. But it is a not oriously diffcult notion to formalize. What are the properties of trust? How is i t learned, propagated, and utilized successfully? How can it be modeled? How can a trust model be used to derive protocols that are effcient and reliable when e m ployed in today's expansive networks? Past work has been concerned with only a f ew of these issues, without concentrating on the need for a comprehensive approa ch to trust modeling. In this paper, we take a first step in that direction by studying an artificial community of agents that uses a notion of trust to succeed in a game against nat ure. The model is simple enough to analyze and simulate, but also rich enough to exhibit phenomena of real-life interactive communities. The model requires age n ts to make decisions. To

Wuhan University journal of natural sciences