Agent versus Object

Hi, everybody.

I read about how the impact of the agent-based technology probably will be not as much as the impact in the object orientation in the terms of the mainstream. The article with the title "Agent Technology: Computing as Interaction" described the challanging problems that agent-based technology will have to handle. This article was written by Michael Luck, Peter McBurney, Onn Shehory, Steve Willmott and the agentlink community . Below is what they said about the problems.

In attempting to understand the likely future development of agent-based computing, and its pathway to adoption, one might usefully consider the history of object-oriented technologies. It started from the Simula languages in 1962 when the term of "object oriented" itself was introduced by Alan Kay in 1970. Then there came the development of Smalltalk in 1973 and C++ in 1983. Furthermore, the developments were followed with the Object Management Group being formed in 1989, then the Java was announced in 1991, CORBA in 1991, UML in 1994 and ANSI C++ in 1998. This is an extended period over which the technologies and techniques involved came to maturity and to wide scale adoption.

Agent and object technologies are both essentially disruptive technologies that provide more effective and flexible techniques for software and its development. To understand how the future of agent-based technology may progress, we need to look to the differences between these technologies. Firstly, object technology began in an era in which computing as a discipline and as an industry was relatively immature, and limited in scope. The techniques, technologies, and standard were still not common for the development of the software as is the case now. The changes required for the object to be existed was far less substantial and challenging than it is now for agent technologies.

Secondly, while there are still many problems to be tackled in computing, the degree of improvement, in terms of productivity or efficiency, to be realized from specific advances decreases as the general level of maturity in computing increases. Thus, while there was no step change arising through object orientation, the gradual improvement in the state of software is likely to be even less marked with agent technologies. Thirdly, the current environment is much more heterogeneous also more distributed and diverse than at any point in the previous software development, and it will continue to more evolve in this manner. The result is a further development of standards, techniques, methodologies and multiple vested interests and corporate initiatives that must be integrated, overcome or otherwise addressed for broad acceptance of new paradigms. Investment in new technologies at this point of the IT adoption cycle presents a much more challenging problem than ever before. For all these reasons, it is likely that no technology in the near future will have anything like the impact of object orientation.

Does the article above just tell us that agent-based technology will fail in the future? From what I believe , it will definetely not true. Agent-based technology will bring us to the more efficient and more machine readable system. It will make the less intervention of human in processing a problem in order to achieve its certain goals. However, the article above told us that it will be more challenging problem to be solved when we want to have our system with agent-based capabilities in it. One obvious example is by imagining how huge and the semi-structured data in the internet will be processed using the agent-based technology. It will be a very challenging work to do that. Later, I will discuss also about many researchers who also think about how to include the agent in the internet.