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
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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