What is an agent? Many definitions in the A.I., Internet and engineering literature..
For our purposes, agents:

• perform a task that would normally be performed by a person, perhaps using software tools
• communicate in a common agent language over the Internet
• obey an agent communications protocol
• maintain state information, and act on it
• encapsulate engineering software

For more detail, see
Agent-Based Engineering, the Web, and Intelligence
December 1996, IEEE Expert

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cjp

Last modified: Tue Jan 26 10:38:11 PST 1999