Technologies

Autonomous Agents

Agents are programs or entities that operate with little or no human supervision. They initiate actions, construct plans, migrate to different locations, and communicate with other agents. Most importantly they can independently respond to events and adjust their behavior accordingly to accomplish goals. Well designed agents will have personality (and like a good waiter will intrude only when necessary) and remember training and tasks even if the user’s computer crashes or is turned off.

There are different classes of agents depending on the agent’s abilities: they may be static or mobile; react to events or not; work alone or with other agents; learn or be hardwired; autonomous or not.

Intelligent agents can solve several classes of problems. They simplify distributed computing, information retrieval, sorting and classification of data, and handle repetitious tasks for users. Agents have taken over many tasks people do not wish to do themselves, like scheduling appointments, answering email, sorting news group information, and getting the current news stories that match a person’s interest. As the agent learns more about its user it will become more useful.

Agents’ behavior and ability to solve problems may be either in the individual agent or the agent may serve as a dumb part of a group that can solve a problem. Agents that work as a part of a group form a more stable system and may be able to handle tasks not easily done by computers. Without a central intelligence the group may actually become stronger and smarter. This type of agent setup may scale up better than individual systems. Java and Python are the preferred languages for agents.

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