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"I think we're still on that topic, still trying to figure out what computers are, how they change us, why we use them."
- Neal Stephenson
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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. |
| 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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'It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.'
'...a single perfectly level platform, which rose so high above the water that it was not splashed by the waves.'
'Is an extra-factual memory that convincing?' Quail asked.
Megastructures have repair robots, which have repair robots, ad infinitum.
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Perfect for clot-busting in the human brain. No Raquel Welch and no lasers, though.
