Talk:Software agent

This article is still a mess...
and the examples are, well, non-agents. I.e.

Buyer agents (shopping bots) => collaborative filtering != agents

User agents (personal agents) => form filling software != agents

...

Merge Software agent with Intelligent agent?
Maybe the person who has proposed the merge could state their reasons here? AFAIAC intelligent agents are a subcategory of software agents ... I propose to keep the scope of this page as is, until enough work has been done on the IA subsection to merit splitting it off as its own page ("Intelligent Agent (Software)" phps.?) These are distinct concepts and a merge of two weak pages does not create a strong one. No longer relevant Steipe (talk) 22:27, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Major edit proposals
This article is a mess! I plan to revise this article over the weekend (Jan 21/22 2006), if anyone has taken ownership and/or has any stake in this article please comment here. If there are any suggestions on edits, let's hear about them. -- Steipe 13:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * It is in desperate need of clear structuring;
 * Irrelevant content needs to be deleted;
 * Redundancy needs to be removed;
 * English grammar needs to be revised;
 * Many sentences don't actually make sense.

Let's not make things too hasty, friend. Your proposal did not show how you plan to edit the article(you are not planning to rewrite them all by yourself, do you ?).

I think a new article structure would be a good start, since it was bad structure that led to this mess in the first place. What do everybody else say ?

--Cynehelm 19:32, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Cool. Someone cares about this page. :-)

Since there was no further comment to the outline I had posted here, I went ahead with the change (the outline is now the new TOC). This is essentially a structural change (moving things into their appropriate place), very little was removed or edited for now. Let the fun begin. --Steipe 04:58, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Next: the examples section.

I propose to condense most of those 'bots into one subsection together with spiders and crawlers, delete collaborative filtering (OT), and discuss some "real" examples, such as the ones from the CMU Agent Lab. Data mining should really be data prospecting (distinction should be explained here). The BotSpot site looks like product-placement to me (no information there). Among the other examples: DAML and OWL are irrelevant in this context, as are the reference to BSD, CTSS and Maxwell's demon. In what sense a daemon can be viewed to be an agent requires a bit of comment. Comments ? Was addressed Steipe (talk) 22:28, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Considering the excitement generated around General Magic's system about 10 years ago and the lack of success I feel it would be useful to add a historical section that could also explain why these failed. On the paper it looks like a brilliant idea but agents are not quite teeming around here.

There is a troublesome trend in mass deletion of external links on account of "link spam". To dodge that bullet I propose linking to the GNU/Linux AI & Alife HOWTO (part of Linux Documentation Project) and has been under active revision for 10 years.

That HOWTO also includes IRC bots, something missing from this article. --15:53, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I also find this article has a lack of sources. One probably isn't enough for such a high-stakes subject. -- Oddb411 (talk) 14:43, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Layout issue
It is my opinion that the Template:Programming paradigms should be kept in this article, however the current version of that template has been causing layout problems to this and other articles. I believe we need to discuss how we can change the layout of that template to better fit the indicated articles. Since this issue involves many articles (and not just this), I propose to centralize this discussion at the template's talk page. If you are interested, please go there and make a suggestion on how we can better solve this problem. Thanks. --Antonielly (talk) 17:16, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Expert tag restored
I added the expert tag back on this article. My concern is that the basic definitions and structure of this article are inconsistent. The introduction defines agents in terms of "representing another's interests" (i.e. agency). The first section seems to be using a definition based on autonomy. The diagram helps explain the relationship between some of the definitions, but the text doesn't really support the diagram.

What I think is needed is an overview of how the term "agent" is used in regard to software. We need to make sure the article captures all the most common uses of the term. It needs to acknowledge that different sources use the term differently. This needs to be in the first few paragraphs. This is the only way to make this article comprehensive and useful to the reader.

The upshot is that we need a number of authoritative sources. CS textbooks, I think, are the best source, since it is their job to be general. Papers from particular institutions or researchers are poor sources, since they tend to enforce a narrow definition that their authors prefer. CharlesGillingham (talk) 23:38, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Agent References?
Just linking to this from the TIBCO Hawk proposed entry, and found that OWL is defined as an example of an intelligent agent!!! Surely a "language" is not an agent (although an agent could use OWL of course)... Isvana (talk) 12:37, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Agents in the context of OpenAI and LLM's
I'm curious how the definition of an agent would change in the context of large language models. There's an entire new functionality space enabled by LLM's that directly expand the scope of what is possible with a software agent. Promptrotator (talk) 18:52, 7 November 2023 (UTC)