Agent-Oriented Programming Idioms

Agent-oriented programming is a new paradigm for conceptualizing a computational system (Shoham, 1993), differing primarily from object-oriented programming in the inclusion of mental state in each of the processes. This paper offers two special-case versions (or idioms) of agent-oriented programming that encapsulates master-slave and peer-peer type interactions in simple protocols. These two idioms are demonstrated with a distributed version of the popular learning system ID3 (Quinlan, 1986) and with a hybrid system for studying ant behavior.