Example Agent Policies

Agent-based software needs more than just a language for agents to describe their belief and wants. Agents need motivation for performing these communicative acts in terms of expectations about a helpful response. The shared expectations about message-passing behavior, e.g., helpfulness, responsiveness, commitment, etc., comprise the agents' protocols.

There is no single collection of protocols necessary for agenthood. The protocols of a particular system should be optimized for the constituent programs and the task at hand. In this specification, we merely list several protocols that may be useful in many applications. Other protocols, say for skepticism, bidding, reimbursement, and security, should be defined in this manner.

honesty: a message's KQML semantics apply to the sender.
gullibility: agents adopt the beliefs of others that are consistent with their own.
helpfulness: agents adopt the goals of others that are consistent with their own
responsiveness: agents will eventually respond to every received performative for which a response is expected

NOTE: this protocol folds in two important constraints: that an agent will eventually process every performative, and that it will generate some sort of response whenever responses are expected. The purpose of the latter constraint is to force a response like ``sorry'' to performatives that just happen to not produce any other responses. Of course, the meaning of this is totally wrapped-up in the word ``expected''; the intent is that response(s) are expected from a performative like ``ask'', but not ``tell''. ``advertise'' is trickier, but even though responses are possible, or even commonplace, they are not ``expected''.
empathy: agents have a built-in way of determining what performatives are needed by others (i.e., without needing an explicit performative to which to respond)
pertinence: agents will not send performatives that they believe will not benefit others
identity: agents will never register a networking name that is identical with the name of another agent on the same network

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