Intelligent Agent Communities
Agents That Communicate, Learn, and Predict
By Gad Barnea
Bots and Agents have been part of Web technologies since the very beginning. They've been called the first indigenous species of cyberspace. In fact, they've roamed the network in anything from mailing lists to newsgroups and helped us in everything from Web-page indexing to comparison shopping. Although agents are commonly linked to Artificial Intelligence, they are rarely "intelligent." Most cyberspace agents are working at simple and repetitive tasks, following HTTP links, and performing simple arithmetic calculations.
We tend to perceive agent technologies mostly as programs that index the Web or gather some information on the behalf of the Web user -- I'll call this on-behalf computing here. In fact, agent technologies can be broadly defined as independent components of an application that have a task to perform -- typically on remote machines or on the network. The most common examples of agent technology are programs that serve human beings by automating Web searches and other tedious tasks.
In this article, however, we'll look at agents of a different breed -- agents that serve applications and agents that serve other agents. You will also see agents that are really "intelligent." Intelligent software means that the program can learn independently, for the purpose of improving itself, and digest new data into a form from which it can infer when queried by a human or an application. This is the machine equivalent of a (very) educated guess.
Many different fields in computer science have adopted agent technologies in the past decade.
