Applying Software Engineering to Agent Development

Developing intelligent agents and cognitive models is a complex software engineering activity. This article shows how all intelligent agent creation tools can be improved by taking advantage of established software engineering principles such as high-level languages, maintenance-oriented development environments, and software reuse. We describe how these principles have been realized in the Herbal integrated development environment, a collection of tools that allows agent developers to exploit modern software engineering principles.

A human subject experiment was conducted to investigate caffeine’s effect on appraisal and performance of a mental serial subtraction task. Serial subtraction performance data was collected from three treatment groups: placebo, 200, and 400 mg caffeine. The data were analyzed by caffeine treat ment group and how subjects appraised the task (as challenging or threatening). A cognitive model of the serial subtraction task was developed. The model was fit to the human performance data using a parallel genetic algorithm. How the model’s parameters change to fit the data suggest how cognition changes due to caffeine and appraisal. Over all, the cognitive modeling and optimization results suggest that the speed of vocalization varies the most along with changes to declarative memory. This approach provides a way to compute how cognitive mechanisms change due to moderators.

SOAR is one of the oldest and largest AI development efforts, starting formally in 1983. It has also been proposed as a unified theory of cognition (Newell 1990). Most of its current development is as an AI programming language, which was evident at the Twenty-Second SOAR Workshop held at Soar Technology near the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on 1-2 June 2002.