There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain. -- Baron Rothschild

Latest News Items

The power of every agent -- Dan Gilmore's column "Big business, big government face `the power of everyone" could also apply to the power of every agent. Together, we know it all. (6/24)

Those magnificent genes -- From The Guardian : - Our everyday lives could be controlled and coordinated, not just by raw data, but by computers that evolve like living entities. (6/23)

Go to the ant...consider her ways and be wise -- A computerworld story on swarm based agent systems. "Rather than relying on complex, centralized logic, systems that mimic ant behavior use many small, autonomous software agents. Each acting on the simplest of rules, these agents together can solve problems that are enormously complex when viewed as a whole. Higher-level, or "swarm," intelligence emerges from those rudimentary rules in ways that would be difficult to program into conventional software. " (6/23)

Military Game Simulations Make an Ally of Emotion -- A NYT story about the agent-based military simulations that USC's Institute for Creative Technologies is building. (6/21)

Birth of a Thinking Machine -- An LA Times article on Cyc. (6/21)

RuleML DTD 0.8 -- Version 0.8 of the RuleML DTD has been released. RuleML is a developing XML standard for encoding rules and encompasses a hierarchy of rules, from reaction rules (event-condition-action rules), via integrity-constraint rules (consistency-maintenance rules) and derivation rules (implicational-inference rules), to facts (premiseless derivation rules). (6/19)

Latest Directory Additions

Coordination Models, Languages and Applications -- There will be a special Track of the 17th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2002) on Coordination Models, Languages and Applications to be held on 10-14 March 2002 in Madrid. The deadline for submission is 1 September 2001. (6/24)

AAMAS 2002 -- the International Conference on Autonomous Agents; ICMAS the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems; ATAL the international Workshop on Agents Theories, Architectures, and Languages, decided to build on their past successes and converge in 2002 in a Joint Event: The first International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2002) to be held July 15-19, 2002 in Plazzo del Enzo, Bologna, Italy. (6/24)

Computation and externalism -- Oron Shagrir, Content, Computation and Externalism, Mind, Volume 110, Issue 438, pages 369-400. The paper presents an extended argument for the claim that mental content impacts the computational individuation of a cognitive system. .. The corrected arguments support the claim that computational theories of cognition are intentional. Computational externalism is still pending, however, upon the thesis that psychological content is extrinsic. (6/23)

NQL Inc. -- "As the first pure language of the content engineering era, Network Query Language is the ultimate tool for rapid and simple development of intelligent agents, bots, spiders, middleware and scalable business to business content aggregation applications. Network Query Language does for network programming what SQL did for database programming, creating a unified layer across conflicting network standards and software." (6/22)

Super-Toys Last All Summer Long -- This short story by Brian Aldis first appeared in Harper's Bazaar in 1969 and is the inspiration for the Kubrick/Spielberg movie A.I. (6/21)

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