The Software agent reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Software agent

Software agent is used in computer science to refer to pieces of autonomous, or semi-autonomous proactive and reactive, computer software. Examples:

• user agent
• mail transfer agent
• SNMP agent
• DAML
• daemons in Unix-like systems. See the mascot for BSD systems. CTSS first named daemons; see also Maxwell's demon.
• In Unix-style networking servers, httpd is a daemon which implements the Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol at the root of the World Wide Web

Definition of Agent processing can be approached from two interelated directions:

• internal state processing and ontologies for representing knowledge
• interaction protocols - standards for specifying communication of tasks

Agent systems are used to model real world systems with concurrency or parallel processing.

External links

• http://www.agentland.com/
• http://fipa.org/ - Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents