Katalin led a discussion on the agent definitions and agent properties. She presented first a number of definitions from the literature mainly based on the article by Franklin and Gaesser. We compared and analyzed these definitions, especially w.r.t. to their properties and also discussed how these relate to the broad definition by Norvig and Russel.
It seems that there are three types of agents defined: “agents”, “autonomous agents” and “intelligent agents”. It is not always clear, however whether authors mean in fact agents with different properties when using these notions. Autonomy is a basic property that seemingly all agents should possess. However, we couldn’t really agree on what autonomy means. Explanations we gave varied from the notion of being “independent” to being “goal-oriented”, “pro-active”. The conclusion is that there are different degrees of autonomy.
With respect to the agents properties it also seems that learning and adaptation are sometimes interchanged.
In the second part of the meeting the CAS (Complex Adaptive System) definition has been focused, and agent-based modeling as an approach. Here the focus is on agents as interactive individual entities, and the emergent system properties. Agents are classified in three classes based on the rules they use and their level of adaptation: simple agents, complex-rule agents and advanced-rule agents.
Katalin concludes that we shouldn’t really bother about the many definitions; there are agents with different properties and different complexities. What should be important, however, is that authors give a clear description of what they call an “agent” in their paper, which properties the agents have, with definition of these properties.
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