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"Science fiction is what scientists would do if they could - if they had enough grant money, enough time, and enough brains to do the wonderful things they would like to do."
- Greg Bear
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| Data-Retrieval Programs | ||
| Programs that searched the Net for specific information. |
This seems like an early use of the idea of "intelligent agents."
| The visible portion of the flow was only a sliver, a fragment distilled and sent back to this nexus by her electronic servants - her ferrets and foxes, her badgers and hounds - data-retrieval programs euphemistically named after bests, some now extinct but known in earlier times for their tenacity, hunger and unwillingness to take "no" for an answer. All over the world, Daisy's electronic emissaries searched and probed at her bidding, prying loose secrets, correlating, combining, devouring.
... A few words to her autosecretary would send a ferret program forth to fetch the truth in milliseconds. |
| Technovelgy from Earth,
by David Brin. Published by Bantam in 1990 Additional resources -
|
The earliest speculations on the idea of an intelligent agent date to the early nineteen-seventies. Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger published a paper in 1973 on the Actor model. An "actor" is an entity that can make local decisions, create more actors, determine responses and send messages.
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'...war-balloons, or, as it would be more correct to call them, navigable aerostats.'
'This robot is a creature... It is a manlike being. Therefore, like any other talking, thinking man, he is entitled to a court trial!'
'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
