Software Agents (or "Robots
without Hardware")
Exam 3, Cancelled
- Programming Perl, 2nd Edition
By Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen & Randal L. Schwartz
ISBN: 1-56592-149-6 (Recommended text)
and Notes handed out in class, including:
- SodaBot:
A Software Agent Environment and Construction System. MIT AI
Lab Technical Report 1493, and
- Robot-building commands in Perl
Homework assignments
Software agents are one of the newest and fastest-growing areas of
Artificial Intelligence today. This course will cover applications
and design techniques for software agents. Graduate students will be
required to read
a research paper and give a 10 minute presentation on it in the last week or
two of classes.
Note: use the version of 'perl' in my account. It
is configured to use the perl networking libraries.
You can do this by:
- Putting
'/home/jsmith/bin' at the head of
your PATH (so you will use my perl rather than
the system version
- Or write a shell script that executes
'/home/jsmith/bin/perl'
Topics will include:
- What are Software Agents?
- Types of Software Agents.
- Design Principles.
- Programming languages. A Perl Drive-by.
- Perl data structures, with applications to AI
- A nondeterministic recursive-descent parser in Perl
- Grammars and parsing of English.
- Semantics of English.
- Logic programming in Perl: unification and resolution.
- Accessing the Internet in Perl.
- "Generic software agents": SodaBot.
- Special consideration for negotiating agents: scheduling agents.
- Communications protocols for agents.
- Special considerations for Web Crawler agents.
Term project
The term project will involve programming a Question-answering agent in
Perl (or any other suitable language). This agent must have a natural-language
front end and be able to search the Web to answer queries.
Loebner Prize Home
Page
Programming will be done in C++, Perl and/or Lisp.
An online book on Perl:
The Perl 5 Programming Reference