characters We discuss these ideas and suggest how they may apply to believable interactive characters which we call believable agents This work was supported in part by Fujitsu Laboratories and Mitsubishi Electric Research Laborato ries The views and conclusions contained in this document are those

The advent of software agents gave rise to much discussion of just what such an agent is, and of how they differ from programs in general. Here we propose a formal definition of an autonomous agent which clearly distinguishes a software agent from just any program. We also offer the beginnings of a

This paper provides an overview of research and development activities in the field of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. It aims to identify key concepts and applications, and to indicate how they relate to one-another. Some historical context to the field of agent-based computing

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This paper provides a theoretical framework for analysis of consensus algorithms for multi-agent networked systems with an emphasis on the role of directed information flow, robustness to changes in network topology due to link/node failures, time-delays, and performance guarantees. An overview

Intentions, an integral part of the mental state of an agent, play an important role in

The Internet presents numerous sources of useful information---telephone directories, product catalogs, stock quotes, weather forecasts, etc. Recently, many systems have been built that automatically gather and manipulate such information on a user's behalf. However, these resources

Information retrieval (IR) has changed considerably in the last years with the expansion of the Web (World Wide Web) and the advent of modern and inexpensive graphical user interfaces and mass storage devices. As a result, traditional IR textbooks have become quite out-of-date which has led

Evolutionary theory has always been plagued by scantiness of evidence. We see the products of evolution but not much of the process. Most of the story happened long ago, and little remains of the early stages. Especially few traces of behavior remain; only recently were there artefacts that could

are challenging problems due to the considerable diversity, large numbers, dynamic behavior, and geographical distribution of the entities in which a user might be interested. Consequently, information services are a vital part of any Grid software infrastructure, providing fundamental mechanisms for discovery