Knowbot programming: System support for mobile agents

Jeremy Hylton, Ken Manheimer, Fred L. Drake Jr., Barry Warsaw, Roger Masse, and Guido van Rossum.

In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Object Orientation in Operating Systems (IWOOOS '96), pages 8-13, Oct. 1996.

Knowbot ® Programs are mobile agents intended for use in widely distributed systems like the Internet. We describe our experiences implementing security, process migration, and inter-process communication in a prototype system implemented using the object-oriented programming language Python. This infrastructure supports applications that are composed of multiple, autonomous agents that can migrate to use network resources more efficiently.

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Postscript (145KB)

Slides (Postscript, 200KB) from a talk on the Knowbot Operating System presented at the Dartmouth Workshop on Transportable Agents.