Agent Programming and Scripting languages
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Vince Delle Donne, Daniel Gauvin and Hervé Marchal of CRIM (Computer Research center In Montreal)
have developed LALO,
a language and a framework for developing intelligent multiagents
systems. LALO is a language which uses the
Agent Oriented Programming (AOP) paradigm as defined by Yoav
Shoam. In AOP, an agent is determined by it beliefs, his capabilities,
and his commitments, which together comprise its mental
state. AOP encourages a social view of computation in which
communities of agents interact by exchanging information, sending
specific requests, offering services, accepting or refusing tasks,
competing with each other for a task to be accomplished or cooperating
with each other. A program written in LALO is translated into C++
source code, and then may be compiled with your regular C++ compiler.
The agents communicate with KQML (Knowledge Query Manipulation
Language). The LALO framework is available on UNIX platforms, Windows
NT and Windows 95. Send email to
lalo@crim.ca for more information.
12/11/96
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IBM has released a new version of their Agent Building
Environment -- a toolkit for software developers that makes it
easy to build an application based on agents, or to add them to an
existing application. In the alpha version, the intelligent agent
watches for a certain condition, decides what to do based on the rules
you've given it, and triggers an action as a result. This developer
kit comes with a number of pre-built parts which make it easy for you
to add agent technology to applications. The "central intelligence"
brain for the agent is based on reasoning engine and adapter
technologies from IBM's T.J. Watson Research Lab. "Adapters" or
interfaces allow the agent to interact with the rest of the world. The
HTTP adapter, for instance, interfaces with the world-wide-web. The
NNTP adapter interfaces with internet USENET news services, and the
timer adapter allows events to be triggered based on time. You can
write your own adapters, as well, and guidelines and a sample adapter
are provided. Custom adapters can be written in either C++ or Java **.
A simple full-screen interface is also provided to allow you to
specify the rules for the agent's behavior. 12/7/96
- People building agents in Java may find these two Prolog
interpreters written in Java of interest. W-Prolog is a
simple interpreter for a pure subset of Prolog which runs as an applet
or as a stand-alone application. jProlog is
an interpreter by Paul Tarau and Bart Demoen which uses a compiler to
produce faster code. It is close to Clocksin-Mellish Prolog, with
lots of the typical builtins. You need a Prolog system (e.g., SICStus,
BinProlog, BIMprolog) to get it to work. 12/2/96
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General Magic announced and is shipping two Telescript-based products
in a new line of Tabriz
software for the web which "transform passive networks and
applications into active, secure processes for competitive advantage."
Tabriz AgentWare is general-purpose software that enables the
creation and interaction of "processes" that can occur and interact
with one another, even while users requesting the processes aren't
actively connected to a network. Processes can be requests for
information, authorization and verification and other tasks that are
part of a larger goal. The technologies used to build AgentWare
result in processes that are active, secure and persistent across the
Internet, the World Wide Web and corporate intranets-processes that
can be used to build a new, superior class of applications. Tabriz
Agent Tools is an integrated, graphical set of tools for creating,
debugging and maintaining Tabriz applications. Tabriz Agent Tools is
available now as a UNIX System application; a beta release of a
version for Windows NT is expected to ship this Autumn. Tabriz Agent
Tools provides a source-code editor, a class browser, a source-level
debugger and features for managing the components used to build Tabriz
applications.8/10/96
|
is a Perl 5 module that provides a set of functions to (1) send
encrypted, digitally signed perl code to a remote machine to be
executed; and (2) receive code and, depending on who signed it,
execute it in an arbitrarily secure, limited compartment. The
combination of these functions enable direct perl coding of algorithms
to handle safe internet commerce, mobile information-gathering agents,
"live content" web browser helper apps, distributed load-balanced
computation, remote software update, distance machine administration,
content-based information propagation, Internet-wide shared-data
applications, network application builders, and so on. 6/16/96