From: David Combs
Subject: Worth discussing?  This "intelligent software agent" thing, in Java
Date: 
Message-ID: <bf42jo$m9s$1@panix1.panix.com>
Saw this at an australian news site:





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   Cracker JACK set for combat
   By Adam Turner
   July 15 2003

   The stress, fatigue and fear experienced by combat soldiers will be
   recreated on the virtual battlefields of Britain, thanks to an
   Australian software developer.

   Agent Oriented Software has won the contract to provide artificially
   intelligent cyber-soldiers for the British Ministry of Defence's
   electronic war games.

   Part of the ministry's Human Variability in Computer Generated Forces
   corporate research program, the troops exist within simulations as
   independent software entities known as intelligent software agents.

   The combatants are based on AOS's JACK Intelligent agents, Java
   applications that are bestowed with initial beliefs, desires and
   intentions, and then set free to interact with their environment.

   Using JACK, AOS can model intelligence and also the human frailties
   that affect decision-making, says AOS business application manager
   Nick Howden.

   "Computer-generated forces should exhibit real military doctrine and
   tactics. But on top of that, they should also exhibit the human
   traits of soldiers,"Howden says.

   "We look at behaviour moderators, which might be caffeine and other
   drugs, fatigue, fear - all the sorts of things that make you modify
   your behaviour and adopt non-military behaviour. One might be to
   throw your gun down and run away - now, that's not in the tactics
   handbook, but soldiers actually do that.''

   JACK agents are digital chameleons designed to easily interact within
   virtual and real environments. They can play any role in a computer
   simulation, from a soldier to an electrical storm, or control devices
   such as vehicles or manufacturing robots.

   Once interfaced with its surrounds - whether it be via the sensors
   and controls of an unmanned vehicle or the input/output of a
   simulation - an agent begins its charade, modifying its beliefs,
   desires and intentions according to its changing environment. The
   agent plays its part so well that other objects interacting with it -
   whether they be people, machines, applications or other agents -
   believe the agent really is the entity it is pretending to be. This
   allows agents to be dropped into almost any situation with minimal
   modifications, says Howden.

   "People don't want to build an agent system, they want to add agents
   to whatever they're doing. You put an agent into the bit that agents
   are good at and you use other things to do the rest. We've very much
   built it to be plug-in-able,"Howden says.

   AOS was founded in 1997 by researchers from the Australian Artificial
   Intelligence Institute to take on a small Defence Science and
   Technology Organisation contract. The company has former University
   of Melbourne and RMIT researchers on staff and works in collaboration
   with both institutions.

   The decision to write JACK in Java is a key component of its
   flexibility, says Howden.

   "In 1997 we chose to go with Java completely and it was a little bit
   more of a courageous decision then than it is now. At AAII there was
   a system called dMARS Agent System written in C++ and just managing
   it on the different systems you had to port it to was a nightmare,"he
   says.

   "The focus with AOS was really to be a product company and to build a
   commercial, robust intelligent agent product, as opposed to a
   research system that people like to play with.''

   A British office was established 18 months ago to win European work
   such as the Ministry of Defence contract, and AOS also collaborates
   with the University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing.

   JACK is deployed in a variety of fields, such as air-traffic control,
   weather forecasting and manufacturing, but most of AOS's work is in
   defence.

   "Defence is much more into looking at new technologies that can
   expand their capability over the coming years. They've been very much
   early adopters . . . We're using that as a launch pad to move out
   into the commercial world and the international markets,"Howden says.
   "It's sort of like a co-operative research group but not officially.
   We work together, they expand their capabilities and we make our
   product better and get feedback from them as users.''

   AOS is participating in this week's Autonomous Agents and Multiagents
   Systems conference (AAMAS'03) in Melbourne and is running a workshop
   on deploying agent systems.

   This story was found at:
   http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/14/1058034923911.html 
   [count?cid=au_f2_SMH-Printer]

References

   1. http://www.smh.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2003/07/14/1058034923911.html
   2. http://www.smh.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2003/07/14/1058034923911.html