A softbot-based interface to the Internet

The Internet Softbot (software robot) is a fullyimplemented AI agent developed at the University of Washington (Etzioni, Lcsh, & Segal 1993). The softbot uses a UNIX shell and the World-Wide Web to interact with a wide range of internet resources. The softbot’s effectors include ftp, telnet, mail, and numerous file manipulation commaslds. Its sensors include internet facilities such as archie, gopher, netfind, and many more. The softbot is designed to incorporate new facilities into its repertoirc as they become available. The softbot’s "added value" is three-fold. First, it provides an integrated and expressive interface to the internet. Second, the softbot dynamically chooses which facilities to invoke, and in what sequence. For example, the softbot might use netfind to determine David McAllester’s e-mail address. Since it knows that netfind requires a person’s institution as input, the softbot would first search bibliographic databases for a technical report by McAllester which would reveal his institutkm, and then feed that information to netfind. Third, the softbot fluidly backtracks from one facility to another based on information collected at run time. As a result., the softbot’s behavior changes in response to transient system conditions (e.g., the UUCP gateway is down). In this article, we focus on the ideas underlying the softbot-based interface.