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MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS: AN INTRODUCTION TO DISTRIBUTED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE by Jacques Ferber Addison-Wesley, 1999, 509 pp.
Intelligent agents are at the center of one of the most influential notions in current research in artificial intelligence. They are autonomous robots or programs that interact with their environment, possess skills and motivations, and can communicate and work cooperatively with other agents. A multi-agent system is comprised of several intelligent agents working together toward some goal or the completion of some task. Researchers have discovered that multi-agent systems can accomplish tasks as well as or even better than their centralized single program counterparts. The multi-agent system literature spans a wide range of fields including robotics, mathematics, linguistics, psychology,...