Digital Savants In E-BusinessDigital Savants In E-Business

The era of the travel agent may soon be at an end, replaced with autonomous software agents that can find the lowest airfares, book hotel reservations and find hard-to get theater tickets. Researchers from around the globe participated in the recent Trading Agent Competition, which simulates an online auction in which software agents must maximize customer satisfaction and minimize cost. The programming joust in Tampa, Fla., coincided with the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Electronic Commerce. Livingagents, a team from Living Systems, a European E-commerce company, took the top spot.

The trading agents buy and sell goods on behalf of clients and score points based on how close they come to meeting customerrequirements. The contest simulates a complex domain in which there are no obvious solutions and a multitude of trade-off decisions to be made. The software agents compare various methods for executing auction bids, says AT&T Research staffer Peter Stone, whose team won last year's event and came in second this year.

There are real-world applications of this technology. AT&T used its bidding technology to help co-workers who were bidding for telecommunications spectrum in a Federal Communications Commission auction. The agent software helped bidders scope out different scenarios and simulate outcomes of decisions. "Agents assume their actions will have an effect on the behavior of competing agents, so we tried to simulate what other bidders would do," Stone says.

Search engines and Web spiders are primitive incarnations of agent software. The key differences between an autonomous agent and other computer processes: Agents' sensing technology knows when certain conditions arise and can respond to those events or conditions. Autonomous agents are expected to have profound effects on E-commerce. In the future, they could handle business analytics, disaster recovery, and other tasks laboriously carried out by humans. But software agents will never be a substitute for human thought, Stone says. "Think of them as idiot savants--able to do a limited number of activities faster and more accurately than humans." - Karyl Scott