Re: What's the Best Intelligent Agent Software?

Ralph Becket (Ralph.Becket@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Mon, 03 Oct 1994 17:07:16 +0100

That's a tricky one - the agents field is still quite immature.
I think it really depends on what you want to do. I suggest you
have a look at CLIPS (available as freeware, it's a superb rule
based shell that compiles down to C) and DynaCLIPS (not freeware,
but I don't think it costs a bomb). DynaCLIPS is a set of
blackboard extensions to CLIPS allowing you to build DAI type
systems. Part of the problem is that:

i) there's not much `general' intelligence around, since
intelligence is largely knowledge driven, so it's hard
to come up with impressive domain independant agents; and

ii)it's hard to build even general purpose agents without
much intelligence, since different applications require
different representation languages.

Best thing to do would be have a look at (Dyna)CLIPS and post to
comp.ai asking other people's opinion - I'm afraid I'm not an
expert on what's available!

Best of luck,

Ralph