From Computer Networks to Agent Networks.pdfVIP

Proceedings of the 36th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2003 From Computer Networks to Agent Networks Guoqiang Zhong Ken’ichi Takahashi Satoshi Amamiya Daisuke Matsuno Tsunenori Mine Makoto Amamiya Department of Intelligent Systems Kyushu University Kasuga, Fukuoka, Japan 816-8580 {zhong, tkenichi, roger, matsuno, mine, amamiya}@al.is.kyushu-u.ac.jp Abstract forty million hosts have been connected to the Internet by 2002). In contrast to the rapid growth of the global com- From the 1990s on, one of the most important challenges puter network, a global software infrastructure is still lack- facing computer science researchers has been the design ing. and construction of software tools to exploit Internet com- Currently, TCP/IP is the de facto standard in the Inter- puting. At the same time, the development of agent tech- net, and services on the application layer are described in nology has gone hand in hand with the explosion of the terms of transport protocols directly on top of the TCP/IP Internet. As worldwide network computing environments stack. Some well-known examples include World Wide become more and more complex, software agents are be- Web (HTTP), electronic mail (SMTP), file transfer (FTP), lieved to have the potential to help present and manage the virtual terminal (TELNET), etc. The drawback of this ap- Internet in an autonomous or semi-autonom