What is an Autonomous Agent?
An autonomous agent is a computer simulation which is based on concepts from Artificial Life research. Agent simulations are built using object oriented programming technology. The agents are autonomous because once they are programmed they can move about the landscape like software robots. The agents can gather data from their environment, make decisions from this information and change their behavior according to the situation they find themselves in. Each individual agent has its own physical mobility capabilities, sensory capabilities, and cognitive capabilities. This results in behavior that echos the behavior of real animals (in this case humans) in the environment. The process of building an agent is iterative and combines knowledge derived from empirical data with the intuition of the programmer. By continuing to program knowledge and rules into the agent, watching the behavior resulting from these rules and comparing it to what is known about actual behavior, a rich and comple
