Intelligent Agents

Abstract

The  intelligent agents are being viewed as new theoretical models of computation that more closely reflects current computing reality, aimed as new generation models for complex and distributed systems. An agent system can work as a single agent, or as a multiagent system. The intelligent agents have many applications—they are used in software engineering, in buying and selling—like online sales, bids, trading; the agents are also modeled for decision-making—with preferences and criteria for making decisions. This chapter also presents the classification of agents, agent system architecture, how the agents should coordinate among themselves, and the formation of a coalition between agents. The multiagents communicate with each other using agents’ communication languages which are oriented towards performing actions. Other categories of agents are mobile agents—programs which can be moved to any far off place, and can communicate with the environment. The chapter ends with chapter summary, and the set of exercises.

Exercises

• 1. Label the following as an agent or not an agent. Explain your reasoning with justification for each.

  • a. There is a program on a website to collect answers for a questionnaire.

  • b. Google’s web crawler, i.e., Googlebot.

  • c. A distributed IR (Information Retrieval) program to helps you locate Web documents, you are interested in.

  • d. A program operating for a supermarket to automatically locate and bid for the lowest food prices.

  • e. A mail-filtering program that removes SPAM messages in your e-mail received in your account.

  • f. An Internet-wide multi-user game playing program.

  • g. A “chatterbot” program aimed to send messages to chat-rooms and try to fool the people to make them believe that messages are coming from real human beings.

• 2. In a multiagent system agent interact with the environment. How you can model a situation where one agent modifies the environment and the other perceive it, as a dynamic system?

• 3. How the architecture of a computer system is different from agent system? Give the salient differences, and justify their significance.

• 4. A rat searches for food, and at the same time it has to save itself from its predators, and expecting any such it either runs away or hides. For example, a single-agent system model of a rat succeeds in protecting itself from predators as well as in searching the food.

• 5. Explain the coordination and coalition functions between agents. How they differ from each other.

• 6. Write the coalition algorithm in your own language.

• 7. Give an example of evidence of the prevailing use of agents in online buying from the online stores.

• 8. Give a brief note of agent communication languages and compare them with other high-level languages.