Unit 4: Multi-Agent Systems and Collaboration - Practice Quiz

1 What is a multi-agent system?

2 What is a common benefit of using multiple agents?

3 What is the main responsibility of the planner agent?

4 What does an executor agent primarily do?

5 What do collaborative agents typically share?

6 Which behavior best demonstrates agent collaboration?

7 Why is inter-agent communication important?

8 Which item is commonly included in a message between agents?

9 What does task delegation mean in a multi-agent system?

10 Which factor is most useful when selecting an agent for a task?

11 How does distributed problem solving handle a complex problem?

12 What must usually happen after agents solve separate parts of a problem?

13 What is the purpose of orchestration in a multi-agent system?

14 In a sequential orchestration pattern, how are tasks generally performed?

15 What is the main goal of an agent coordination mechanism?

16 Which mechanism can help agents avoid modifying the same resource simultaneously?

17 Which example represents a collaborative enterprise workflow?

18 What defines a role-based agent?

19 Which strategy supports collaboration as the number of agents increases?

20 Which action can improve a multi-agent workflow?

21 A logistics platform uses separate agents for route planning, inventory checking, and delivery scheduling. What makes this system a multi-agent system rather than a single modular program?

22 Three warehouse agents choose tasks independently. Two agents repeatedly select the same package while another package remains unassigned. Which capability is most directly missing?

23 In a planner-executor architecture, a report-generation system creates an outline, assigns research actions, and later revises the outline when a source is unavailable. Which component should perform the revision?

24 An executor reports that a required customer record does not exist. What is the most appropriate next action in a robust planner-executor system?

25 A diagnosis-support workflow includes agents that analyze images, summarize patient history, and check treatment guidelines. Which design best supports effective collaboration?

26 Two research agents return conflicting estimates from equally credible sources. Which response best preserves collaborative reliability?

27 Agents developed by different teams exchange task updates, but failures occur because each team uses different field names and status values. What is the most suitable remedy?

28 A monitoring agent publishes equipment alerts, and several maintenance agents must react independently. Which communication model is most appropriate?

29 A coordinator must delegate a translation task requiring legal expertise and completion within ten minutes. Which policy is most appropriate?

30 Agent A can finish a task in 6 minutes with quality score 0.8, while Agent B needs 10 minutes with quality score 0.95. The deadline is 8 minutes. If meeting the deadline is mandatory, which delegation is valid?

31 Four regional agents optimize delivery routes locally, but their routes compete for the same limited loading dock. What additional step is needed to obtain a feasible global solution?

32 A problem can be divided into five independent simulations whose results are combined at the end. Which strategy is likely to reduce completion time most effectively?

33 A customer-support workflow always passes a request through classification, retrieval, response drafting, and compliance review in that order. Which orchestration pattern best fits this workflow?

34 An analytics workflow sends the same dataset to three specialized agents and then combines their independent findings. Which orchestration pattern is being used?

35 Several agents need exclusive access to a shared machine. Which mechanism most directly prevents two agents from using it simultaneously?

36 A team of agents must select one of three proposed plans, and no central coordinator is available. Which mechanism can produce a collective choice?

37 In an invoice workflow, an extraction agent reads invoice fields, a policy agent checks limits, and a payment agent issues funds. Which control is most important before payment?

38 A software-delivery system has developer, reviewer, and release-manager agents. Which permission model best follows role-based design?

39 A multi-agent service slows down when one coordinator handles every message from 500 worker agents. Which change most directly addresses the bottleneck?

40 A workflow has three stages with average times of 2, 12, and 3 seconds. The stages must remain sequential, but the middle stage can use additional agents. Which optimization is most likely to improve throughput?

41 A multi-agent system has agents with locally optimal policies, but its global performance is worse than that of a centralized controller. Which explanation best accounts for this outcome?

42 Agents and repeatedly choose whether to share costly information. Sharing benefits both agents only when both participate, but withholding yields a short-term individual advantage. Which design most directly promotes sustained cooperation?

43 A planner creates a valid ten-step plan, but after step four the environment changes and invalidates a key precondition for step seven. What should a robust planner-executor architecture do?

44 A planner delegates a database migration to an executor. The executor times out, but the planner cannot determine whether the migration committed. Which interface property is most important for safe recovery?

45 Three diagnostic agents use the same model, training data, and retrieval source. A majority vote among them shows little improvement over one agent. Which change is most likely to improve collective accuracy?

46 Two agents propose incompatible solutions supported by different evidence. Which resolution policy best preserves useful disagreement while still producing a decision?

47 In an asynchronous agent network, messages may be delayed, duplicated, or delivered out of order. Which message design best prevents an older update from overwriting a newer one?

48 An agent sends the message Approve account 1842 to another agent, but the receiver interprets it as permission to activate the account rather than permission to continue review. Which protocol improvement most directly removes this ambiguity?

49 A coordinator must assign task to one of three agents. Their success probabilities and execution costs are , , and . If utility is , which agent should receive the task?

50 A manager agent delegates a compliance check to a specialist that reports high confidence but cannot provide evidence. The action is irreversible and high impact. What is the best delegation policy?

51 Several agents must choose values for shared variables subject to cross-agent constraints. They cannot reveal their complete local data. Which approach best supports distributed convergence while preserving locality?

52 Agents independently solve overlapping subtasks and later discover that their outputs impose contradictory assumptions on a shared variable. Which mechanism would have prevented the most wasted computation?

53 A workflow contains independent research tasks, a synthesis task that depends on all research outputs, and a final verification task. Which orchestration structure best captures these dependencies?

54 A central orchestrator becomes a throughput bottleneck because it routes every message, including routine peer updates. Which redesign reduces this bottleneck while retaining governance over critical actions?

55 Two agents repeatedly acquire resources in opposite orders: agent locks then waits for , while agent locks then waits for . Which coordination rule prevents this deadlock?

56 Agents allocate scarce compute through an auction, but one agent exaggerates its private task value to win capacity. Which mechanism property most directly discourages this behavior?

57 In an enterprise purchasing workflow, a requester agent creates an order, an approval agent authorizes it, and a payment agent releases funds. Which control best enforces separation of duties?

58 A role-based system allows a research agent to supply evidence and an approval agent to authorize deployment. The research agent embeds an instruction in its evidence asking the approver to bypass policy. What is the strongest architectural defense?

59 A system broadcasts every observation to all agents, producing approximately message deliveries per round. Which strategy most directly improves communication scalability when collaboration is sparse?

60 A workflow has two parallel branches with expected durations of 4 and 9 minutes, followed by a 3-minute merge task. Optimizing the 4-minute branch to 1 minute does not change end-to-end latency. Which optimization should be prioritized next?