Please click the advert
Download free ebooks at bookboon.com 34
Perspective Key Ideas Some Application Areas
Artificial Intelligence An agent is embodied (i.e. situated) in an environment and makes it own decisions. It perceives the environment through sensors and acts on the environment through actuators.
Intelligent Agents. Intelligent Systems. Robotics.
Distributed Computing An agent is an autonomous software process or thread.
The agent performs a task on behalf of a user. i.e. The agent acts as a proxy; the user cannot perform (or chooses not to perform) the task themselves.
An agent provides a model for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous individuals in a network.
Game Theory. Complex Systems. Multi-agent systems. Evolutionary Programming.
Table 2.1 Various perspectives on the meaning of the term ‘Agent’.
The term ‘bot’ – an abbreviation for robot – has become common as a substitute for the term ‘agent’.
In academic publications, the latter is usually preferred – for example, conversational agent rather than chatbot or chatterbot – although they are synonymous. A list of bots is shown in Table 2.2 named according to the task(s) they perform. The list is based on a longer list provided in Murch and Johnson (1999; pages 46-47).
Bot name(s) Description
Chatterbots Agents that are used for chatting on the Web.
Annoybots Agents that are used to disrupt chat rooms and newsgroups.
Spambots Agents that generate junk email (‘spam’) after collecting Web email addresses.
Mailbots Agents that manage and filter e-mail (e.g. to remove spam).
Spiderbots Agents that crawl the Web to scrape content into a database (e.g. Googlebot).
For search engines (e.g. Google) this is then indexed in some manner.
Infobots Agents that collect information. e.g. ‘Newsbots’ collect news; ‘Hotbots’ find the hottest or latest site for information; ‘Jobbots’ collect job information.
Knowbots or Knowledgebots
Agents that seek specific knowledge. e.g. ‘Shopbots’ locate the best prices;
‘Musicbots’ locate pieces of music, or audio files that contain music.
Table 2.2 Some bots and their applications.
Other names for agents and bots include: software agents, wizards, spiders, intelligent software robots, softbots and various further combinations of the words ‘software’, ‘intelligent’, ‘bot’ and ‘agent’.
Download free ebooks at bookboon.com 35
Confusion can also arise because people will often adopt terms from other areas, and transfer the meaning into their own areas of interest. In the process, the original meaning of the term can often become changed or confused. For example, ‘robot’ is another term like ‘agent’ where the precise meaning is difficult to pin down. The term ‘robot’ is now being confused with the term ‘bot’ – many people now consider a ‘robot’ as not necessarily a physical machine, because included in their definition are such things as Web spiders (as used for search engines), and conversational bots (such as one might encounter these days when ringing up a helpline). Even more confusion arises because, for some people, both of these could also be considered to be agents.
What can also cause confusion with the use of the term agent is that it is often related to the concept of
“agency”, which itself can have multiple meanings. One meaning of the term agency is the capacity of an agent to act in a world – for humans, it is related to their ability to make their own choices which will then affect the world that they live in. This meaning is closely related to the meaning of agent that we adopt in these books. However, another meaning of agency is authorization to act on another’s behalf – for example, a travel agency is authorized to act on behalf of its customers to find the most competitive travel options.
Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary lists the following meanings for the term agent:
1. One that acts or exerts power;
2. a: something that produces or is capable of producing an effect : an active or efficient cause b: a chemically, physically, or biologically active principle;
3. a means or instrument by which a guiding intelligence achieves a result;
4. one who is authorized to act for or in the place of another: as
a: a representative, emissary, or official of a government <crown agent> <federal agent>
b: one engaged in undercover activities (as espionage) : spy <secret agent>
c: a business representative (as of an athlete or entertainer) <a theatrical agent>;
5. a computer application designed to automate certain tasks (such as gathering information online).
The fourth meaning of agent relates to the meaning of agency often used in general English, such as used in the common phrases ‘insurance agent’, ‘modeling agent’, ‘advertising agent’, ‘secret agent’, and ‘sports agent’. (See Murch and Johnson (1999; page 6) for a longer list of such phrases). This can cause the most confusion as it differs with the meaning of agent adopted in these books (which is more related to the fifth meaning).
Download free ebooks at bookboon.com 36
All of these similar, but slightly different, meanings spring from the underlying concept of an ‘agent’.
This is perhaps best understood by noting that an agent or agent-oriented system is analogous to a human in real life. Considering this analogy, we can make comparisons between the agent-oriented systems we design with attributes of people in real life. People make their own decisions, and exist within, interact with, and effect the environment that surrounds them. Similarly, the goal of agent designers is to endow their agent-oriented systems with similar decision-making capabilities and similar capacity for interacting and effecting their environment. In this light, the different meanings listed in the dictionary definition are related to each other by the underlying analogy of an entity that has the ability to act for itself, or on behalf of another, or with the ability to produce an effect, with some of the capabilities of a human. The agent exists (is situated) within an environment and is able to sense, move around and affect that environment, by making its own decisions so as to affect future events. The agent is analogous to a person in real life having some of a person’s abilities.
Brands of ExxonMobil
Bright minds equal a brighter future.