Building cognitively rich agents using the SIM_Agent toolkit
Aaron Sloman, Brian S. Logan · Communications of the ACM · 1999
Synthetic agents with varying degrees of intelligence and autonomy are being designed in many research laboratories. Motivations include military training simulations, educational software, games and entertainment, digital personal assistants, software agents managing Internet transactions or purely scientific curiosity. Different approaches are being explored, including, at one extreme, research on interactions between agents, and at the other extreme, research on processes within agents. Trade-offs between different types of architectures are not clear and much research is still required. Although more efficient toolkits dedicated to particular types of agent architectures will be more appropriate in tasks in which the architectural requirements are narrowly specified in advance, it is expected that, increasingly, toolkits with the flexibility of SIM_AGENT will be needed as research focuses strongly on agents with more sophisticated multifunctional architectures, which raise many of the hardest unsolved problems in Artificial Intelligence. INSET: Further Information and Availability.