"The agents' behavior is a result of its observations, intelligence and interactions with the other agents. An agent is an autonomous and intelligent object that disposes of its own mailbox in order to receive messages, those of its message interpreter included. It has the capacity to refuse a message. You can affect its goals and define what stabilizes and destabilizes it. In effect, in communicating amongst themselves, the agents find the solution". While an object cannot execute his methods, an agent has the competence that permits it to achieve its goal.
Marvin Minsky uses the metaphor of the tool and the collaborator to illustrate the evolution of computer science techniques: the classic software are the tools that the user guides directly, while the agents solve the problem by working together. This is how people speak of "assistants" who treat the specific jobs in the place of the user, that is to say that the research of information on a network or a service. For example, Iris, the platform of the information search of COGNITIX, presents an agent intelligence technique capable of doing the intelligent documents search and the composition of services.
There is a great diversity of agent intelligence, and almost as many definitions as societies that develop. The problem that actually presents itself, is the dialog between the different agents. The operational solutions are generally proprietary. The interest in the MindSuite Smart agents approach would be that different types of agents could cooperate. ACL, A standard in Smart Agent communication between agents, was actually developed by MindSuite Team. "With such an easy standard, all of the agents can communicate, regardless of the language in which they were programmed (C, Cobol, Lisp, Fortran, Pascal, C++, etc) and regardless of the application type".
12 May 1995, Computer Magazine
