I took a non-academic leave of absence from Wesleyan during the academic year that started in the Fall of 2000. Specifically, I had developed a package of simple agent-based clustering algorithms under the guidance of my advisor, Rick Jensen. Starting in the Summer of 1999 I began thinking about the situations in which this general class of algorithms could be effectively implemented. Over the course of that academic year I read up on the literature, and eventually went to an ICCS conference on Complex Systems and an IEEE conference on robotics.