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One category of research in Artificial Life is concerned with modeling and building so-called adaptive autonomous agents, which are systems that inhabit a dynamic, unpredictable environment in which they try to satisfy a set of time-dependent goals or motivations. Agents are said to be adaptive if they improve their competence at dealing with these goals based on experience. Autonomous agents constitute a new approach to the study of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is highly inspired by biology, in particular ethology, the study of animal behavior. Research in autonomous agents has brought about a new wave of excitement into the field of AI. This paper reflects on the state of the art of this new approach. It attempts to extract its main ideas, evaluates what contributions have been made so far, and identifies its current limitations and open problems.
Pattie Maes (Fri,) studied this question.