On Fri, 6 Jan 1995 Nesta Stubbs <nesta@nesta.pr.mcs.net> wrote:

...

There was some recent talk about network agent technology on this list.

does anynoe have any information about intelligent agents? I mean I know about filter and stuff, but they arent intelligent agents. I assume one would be something like the WWW worm and other searching scripts that have a database of information to cross-reference their finds and decide what to send back to you.

You might want to check out Brian LaMacchia's Ph.D. proposal to create a new class of knowbot, to be termed "Internet Fish". It is posted on http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/bal-home.html LaMacchia's proposal is interesting in that his 'fish' seem to have limited autonomy, thus moving us closer to a content-addressable model of net info retrieval. Also of interest is RFC 1728: Resource Transponders, by C. Weider. The idea is that there should be meta-information (information about information) available for use by info retrieval programs like 'archie'.

From ftp://nic.ddn.mil/rfc/rfc1728.txt

The following is extracted from LaMacchia's abstract:

We will design, implement and deploy a system for constructing ``Internet Fish,'' a new type of resource discovery tool. Internet Fish attempt to discover new sources of information related to a particular topic; characteristics that describe the topic of interest may be specified by the user or deduced by the Fish over the course of time. As part of the information-gathering process Fish conduct long-term conversations with users; these conversations permit Fish to ask for human assistance when necessary and allow humans to dynamically reallocate Fish resources. In addition, Fish facilitate *serendipitous* resource discovery; that is, the act of finding interesting information in an unexpected place or manner, information that we were ``lucky'' to have discovered.