Agents Are Coming Back From The Dead

Author(s): Rafe Brena, Ph.D.

Originally published on Towards AI.

They stayed buried for 20 years

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I worked on AI full-time for over 30 years, at least 10 of them in an area called “Multiagent Systems,” Intelligent Agents, or simply “Agents,” depending on who you ask.

In this post, I’ll discuss how Agent technology came to be, what its promise was, why it failed to deliver results (which caused a loss of interest in the area), and finally, how the idea of agents is making a comeback today. These topics should interest anybody thinking about developing “agents” or just considering using them.

In 1985, the great Marvin Minsky published the book “The Society of Mind.” By then, Minsky was acknowledged as the father of AI (alongside John McCarthy), so he didn’t need to make any additional breakthroughs. But he came up with an interesting idea, and he put it on paper. As a side note, I comment that Minsky was, in a way, my “academic grampa” as my advisor (Adolfo Guzmán) was his PhD student at MIT.

Back then, Artificial Intelligence as a field had enjoyed its first big developments (including Knowledge Representation, Expert Systems, Planning, Intelligent Search — to name some of… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI