Automatic generation of intelligent agent programs

One cause for excitement about agent oriented AI is the belief that it is easier to write programs for many narrow, autonomous systems than for fewer, broader, user-driven systems. A related cause for excitement is the primary message of these comments: it is also easier to automatically generate agent programs. The artificial life, machine learning, and automatic programming literature already describes many experiments in which systems with agent-like properties have been automatically generated. Although most of the previously generated systems have been too simple to perform helpful tasks for actual users, recent advances suggest that useful intelligent agents will soon be within reach of these techniques. The paper focuses on one particular technology, genetic programming, but related points should apply to other automatic programming technologies.