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Alife Digest Number 004
Artificial Life Digest, Number 4
Wednesday, March 14th 1990
Issue's Topics:
Information agents
RE: Information agents
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Date: Wed, 14 Mar 90 08:09:34 +0100
From: d88-cwe@nada.kth.se (Christian Wettergren)
Subject: Information agents
Hello!
I read an interesting article in a swedish computer magazine. It claimed
that Nasa is investigating the possiblity of so called 'information-agents'.
That is some kind of virus-alike program that should cruise the Internet
in search of some specific information.
I have some questions;
1. Has anybody done any work on this? (Obviously, but on this list ?)
2. How effective has it been ?
3. Isn't there a great risk that you can't distinguish between viruses
and these agents. (Some kind of Pandora's box ?)
4. Is there any pointers to Nasa's papers on this ?
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"Computer Science is not about computers, any more than astronomy is about
telescopes" - unknown
Christian Wettergren, d88-cwe@nada.kth.se, 08 - 36 96 92
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Date: Wed, 14 Mar 90 16:36:59 EST
From: Eric T. Freeman <efreeman@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Subject: RE: Information agents
On our 20+ hour drive to Santa Fe we came across this topic. We
speculated that one of the first kinds of useful alife to appear
would be small software agents that would exploit clusters of
information (a good start would be the local USENET News server) and
collect relevant information for whoever created them.
I have often thought of writing code to do this but I've never had the
time to. Donald Norman mentioned once that he had something similar to
this running, I'm not sure if he was being facetious or not.
Dr. Norman?
I know there are already retrieval services and such but I'm talking
about fairly active agents which can move around in networks, collect
information, and then come home. Of course there is the whole issue
of how intelligent these agents have to be but I'm more interested in
how they move around, reproduce, communicate, etc.
Sure this all sounds a bit dangerous...
Sorry Christian, I have no pointers to references.
Eric
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Eric T. Freeman efreeman@silver.bacs.indiana.edu
Artificial Life Research Group freeman@dftnic.gsfc.nasa.gov
Indiana University Computer Science efreeman@cmns-sun.think.com
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