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by nickpsecurity 3800 days ago
I used to do that back when I was investigating and toying with AI. Had a whole book dedicated to all the ways one could apply it. One use case was to send an agent over our slow, expensive connections to where the data was to do work for a price and bring just the results back. Since then, our connections and machines have gotten fast. Yet, HN posts show the concept lives on in cloud services doing datamining and stuff for a new reason: pulling a lot of data out of the cloud costs a fortune vs pulling just the results of on-premises analysis.

Agent-oriented programming lives on today in a new form. Just dawned on me as I saw your post. :)
1 comments
protomyth 3800 days ago
Weirdly, I'm not as interested in the AI aspect or the mobile code aspect[1]. I'm much more interested in a organization and modularization of system sense. I think it has an obvious code parallelism and a communication aspect for business users.

1) well, in the traditional Telescript sense. I am a bit interested for load balancing and redundancy.

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nickpsecurity 3800 days ago
That morphed into application and OS containers. Basically. They're way better than anything agent-oriented programming had back in the day. Also more versatile. That's why you don't hear about them for that much anymore except fringe academia.

Might have been different if Cyc or OpenMind had achieved anything. They could be the reference point for autonomous, mobile agents using knowledge-based programming. Best just to create more high-level languages, good libraries, and ways to package them up. It's not just good enough: it's more predictable and reliable than agent or expert systems even on their intended use-cases. Funny how that worked out, eh?

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protomyth 3799 days ago
> That morphed into application and OS containers. Basically. They're way better than anything agent-oriented programming had back in the day. Also more versatile. That's why you don't hear about them for that much anymore except fringe academia.

The applications and stuff that goes into containers has to be written in some language, and I think an agent oriented language might be more suitable for large programs than what we currently have. I really don't think they are better, just more in line with what we have now.

As I said, I'm not really interested in the expert system aspect (AI). I'm looking at this as a language issue to build big systems. I think containers are not a language answer but a coping mechanism for current languages and practices. I've been doing research on a different path. I hope others are looking beyond what we have now and what paths history didn't take because C and UNIX won.

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nickpsecurity 3799 days ago
Most of what it takes to do that were just some interpreters and function calls. Originally established in distributed computing like Amoeba, MPP systems, and Obliq in agent-oriented systems. Might help if you think on it looking at distributed, agent, and reactive languages to see what language aspects you think would make it easier. Then you'll be able to convey it better.

To me, it's just a VM (or source), ability to capture state, and one or more function calls. Any language could do this.

Obliq just in case you didn't know about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obliq

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