Sports Agents, Secret Agents and 
AI Agents

 

 

 

There are many kinds of agents.

 

In the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire, the title character is played by

Tom Cruise. He is a sports agent for the Cardinal's wide receiver,

Rod Tidwell, played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. The best way for his

agent to represent him, argues Tidwell, is to "Show me the money."

 

                                                          M1 gives a new assignment to the

                                                          British Intelligence Agency's "007,"

                                                          also known as "Bond – James Bond."

 

I                                                         In the Marvel Cinematic Universe,
                                                          there is an organization called

                                                          Strategic Homeland Intervention,
                                                          Enforcement and Logistics

                                                          Division (S.H.I.E.L.D.). It is a fictional
                                                          peacekeeping and spy agency dealing
                                                          with numerous superheroes and
supernatural phenomena. The director of S.H.I.E.L.D. needed some  

super help, so he called on a powerful group of agents called the  

Avengers. The group included some admirable characters like  

Tony Stark (Iron Man), the Hulk, Hawkeye, Thor, Captain America  

and Black Widow. Each one had a unique superpower to offer.

 

So what is an agent? It is something that represents someone or
something else. An agent acts on behalf of its owner, sometimes
simply just following its owner's instructions but often with a good
amount of independence to save the owner time and get better results.

 

 

AI Agents

 

In the world of "Artificial Intelligence" software you also find agents –
AI agents (also referred to as intelligent agents), which are emerging
as a powerful programming technique for creating flexible and
scalable solutions. These kinds of agents have goals, strategies for
achieving these goals, and tasks they undertake to carry out
the strategies.

 

Today you'll find AI agents acting on behalf of humans within cars
and planes, hospitals and labs, computers and robots, to name a few.
They are also used in industry to control machine operations, and in space to remotely control spacecraft and probes.

 

More recently, additional AI agents are being added to the mix to create unified systems of agents that can do much more than single agents alone. By emulating how humans collectively make decisions to achieve goals, like they do as part of a supply chain, production operation, electric distribution grid, or trading market, multiple AI agent systems can greatly improve business results.

 

These kinds of multi-agent systems, like their human counterparts, can organize themselves in hierarchies, including with supervisory agents, to best reach overall objectives for a business. For instance low-level agents acting on behalf of factory workstations might focus on achieving maximum flow of their station's production while their supervisory agents are focused on the decisions that lead to an optimal balance of factory-wide production and costs.

 

This type of agent organization also has the advantage of distributing computing to enable decision making within big data environments. Lower-level agents do what might be described as "little compute" on devices and supervisory agents do a "big compute" on a central server, such as one in an Internet cloud.