Why Autonomy Makes the Agent
Samuel Joseph, Takahiro Kawamura · Series in machine perception and artificial intelligence · 2001
This paper works on the premise that the position stated by Jennings et al. [17] is correct. Specifically that, amongst other things, the agent metaphor is a useful extension of the object-oriented metaphor. Object-oriented (OO) programming [29] is programming where data-abstraction is achieved by users defining their own data-structures (see figure 1), or "objects". These objects encapsulate data and methods for operating on that data; and the OO framework allows new objects to be created that inherit the properties (both data and methods) of existing objects. This allows archetypeal objects to be defined and then extended by different programmers, who needn't have complete understanding of exactly how the underlying objects are implemented