February 19, 2005
The field of software agents has been brewing (or as we say, "emerging") for many years now, the visions and expectations always many steps ahead of the reality. The basic concept is that a computer program does something for you with out you needing to directly control the program itself.
As originally visualized, an agent might gather news from many sources and construct a personalized "newspaper" to deliver to each reader. Or a "shopping bot" goes comparison shopping for you. Or a travel-planning "bot" (short for robot) arranges the details for a trip. Or a "news alert" sends you email or an instant message as desired news topics hit the news wire. We do in fact have quite a number of such services today, and personalization is one of the features that software designers try to design into almost all software these days, but this primitive efforts still fall far short of the kind of intelligence that we would like to see in software agents.
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Updated: February 19, 2005 09:42:13 PM -0500
Copyright © 2005 John W. Krupansky d/b/a Base Technology