Agent

A program that performs some information gathering or processing task in the background. Typically, an agent is a given a very small and well-defined task. Although the theory behind agents has been around for some time, agents have become more prominent with the recent growth of the Internet. Many companies now sell software that enables you to configure an agent to search the Internet for certain types of information. In computer science, there is a school of thought that believes that the human mind essentially consists of thousands or millions of agents all working in parallel. To produce real artificial intelligence, this school holds, we should build computer systems that also contain many agents and systems for arbitrating among the agents' competing results.