The concept of an agent has become important in both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mainstream computer science. Our aim in this paper is to point the reader at what we perceive to be the most important theoretical and practical issues associated with the design and construction of intelligent agents. For convenience, we divide these issues into three areas (though as the reader will see, the divisions are at times somewhat arbitrary). Agent theory is concerned with the question of what an agent is, and the use of mathematical formalisms for representing and reasoning about the properties of agents. Agent architectures can be thought of as software engineering models of agents;researchers in this area are primarily concerned with the problem of designing software or hardware systems that will satisfy the properties specified by agent theorists. Finally, agent languages are software systems for programming and experimenting with agents; these languages may embody principles proposed by theorists. The paper is not intended to serve as a tutorial introduction to all the issues mentioned; we hope instead simply to identify the most important issues, and point to work that elaborates on them. The article includes a short review of current and potential applications of agent technology.

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Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice

http://www.123seminarsonly.com/Seminar-Reports/050/62112045-Agent-Oriented-Programming.pdf

Agent-oriented programming

In this provocative book, Barwise and Perry tackle the slippery subject of \"meaning, \" a subject that has long vexed linguists, language philosophers, and logicians.

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Situations and Attitudes.

The concept of an agent has become important in both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mainstream computer science. In this article, we present a survey of what we perceive to be the most important theoretical and practical issues associated with the design and construction of intelligent agents. The article also includes a short review of current and potential applications of agent technology, and closes with a glossary of key terms, an annotated list of systems, and a detailed bibliography. Pointers to further reading are provided throughout.

/pdf/agent-theories-architectures-and-languages-a-survey-4m08hmierd.pdf

Agent theories, architectures, and languages: a survey

Shoham, Y., Agent-oriented programming, Artificial Intelligence 60 (1993) 51-92. A new computational framework is presented, called agent-oriented programming (AOP), which can be viewed as a specialization of object-oriented programming. The state of an agent consists of components such as beliefs, decisions, capabilities, and obligations; for this reason the state of an agent is called its mental state. The mental state of agents is described formally in an extension of standard epistemic logics: beside temporalizing the knowledge and belief operators, AOP introduces operators for obligation, decision, and capability. Agents are controlled by agent programs, which include primitives for communicating with other agents. In the spirit of speech act theory, each communication primitive is of a certain type: informing, requesting, offering, and so on. This article presents the concept of AOP, discusses the concept of mental state and its formal underpinning, defines a class of agent interpreters, and then describes in detail a specific interpreter that has been implemented.

Agent Oriented Programming

Although the concept ofknowledge plays a central role in artificial intelligence, the theoretical foundations of knowledge representation currently rest on a very limited conception of what it means for a machine to know a proposition. In the current view, the machine is regarded as knowing a fact if its state either explicitly encodes the fact as a sentence of an interpreted formal language or if such a sentence can be derived from other encoded sentences according to the rules of an appropriate logical system. We contrast this conception, the interpreted-symbolic-structure approach, with another, the situated-automata approach, which seeks to analyze knowledge in terms of relations between the state of a machine and the state of its environment over time using logic as a metalanguage in which the analysis is carried out.

S J Rosenschein

Papers

Formal theories of knowledge in AI and robotics

Formal theories of knowledge in AI and robotics