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Software agent

In computer science, a software agent or software AI is a computer program that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency, which derives from the Latin agere (to do): an agreement to act on one's behalf. Such "action on behalf of" implies the authority to decide which, if any, action is appropriate. Some agents are colloquially known as bots, from robot. They may be embodied, as when execution is paired with a robot body, or as software such as a chatbot executing on a phone (e.g. Siri) or other computing device. Software agents may be autonomous or work together with other agents or people. Software agents interacting with people (e.g. chatbots, human-robot interaction environments) may possess human-like qualities such as natural language understanding and speech, personality or embody humanoid form (see Asimo). Related and derived concepts include intelligent agents (in particular exhibiting some aspects of artificial intelligence, such as reasoning), autonomous agents (capable of modifying the methods of achieving their objectives), distributed agents (being executed on physically distinct computers), multi-agent systems (distributed agents that work together to achieve an objective that could not be accomplished by a single agent acting alone), and mobile agents (agents that can relocate their execution onto different processors). The basic attributes of an autonomous software agent are that agents: are not strictly invoked for a task, but activate themselves, may reside in wait status on a host, perceiving context, may get to run status on a host upon starting conditions, do not require interaction of user, may invoke other tasks including communication. The term "agent" describes a software abstraction, an idea, or a concept, similar to OOP terms such as methods, functions, and objects. The concept of an agent provides a convenient and powerful way to describe a complex software entity that is capable of acting with a certain degree of autonomy in order to accomplish tasks on behalf of its host.

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CS-430: Intelligent agents
Software agents are widely used to control physical, economic and financial processes. The course presents practical methods for implementing software agents and multi-agent systems, supported by prog
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The goal of the summer school are providing a rigorous introduction to the foundations of MARL and highlight the challenges that arise in the modern research directions in this area.
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Related concepts (10)
Intelligent agent
In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent (IA) is an agent acting in an intelligent manner; It perceives its environment, takes actions autonomously in order to achieve goals, and may improve its performance with learning or acquiring knowledge. An intelligent agent may be simple or complex: A thermostat or other control system is considered an example of an intelligent agent, as is a human being, as is any system that meets the definition, such as a firm, a state, or a biome.
Multi-agent system
A multi-agent system (MAS or "self-organized system") is a computerized system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can solve problems that are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or a monolithic system to solve. Intelligence may include methodic, functional, procedural approaches, algorithmic search or reinforcement learning. Despite considerable overlap, a multi-agent system is not always the same as an agent-based model (ABM).
Internet bot
An Internet bot, web robot, robot or simply bot is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet, usually with the intent to imitate human activity on the Internet, such as messaging, on a large scale. An Internet bot plays the client role in a client–server model whereas the server role is usually played by web servers. Internet bots are able to perform tasks, that are simple and repetitive, much faster than a person could ever do.
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