Jess in Action

Preface

In 1994, I was working in the Scientific Computing department at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California. We had an impressive (for the time) array of heterogeneous computing equipment: workstations from Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems, Intel PCs running Linux, Macintoshes galore. I was writing software agents that managed dynamically distributed computations across this network. Agents were running on each machine, and they used a sort of “post and bid” method to decide which machines would run which piece of a computation, based on machine capabilities and load balancing. The agents were fairly intelligent in their decision-making capabilities, and the plans they developed were sometimes surprising. Their “brains” ...