Editing Software agent (section)

===History===
The concept of an agent can be traced back to [[Actor model|Hewitt's Actor Model]] (Hewitt, 1977) - "A self-contained, interactive and concurrently-executing object, possessing internal state and communication capability."{{citation needed|date=August 2023}}

To be more academic, software agent systems are a direct evolution of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). MAS evolved from [[Distributed Artificial Intelligence]] (DAI), Distributed Problem Solving (DPS) and Parallel AI (PAI), thus inheriting all characteristics (good and bad) from DAI and [[AI]].

[[John Sculley]]'s 1987 "[[Knowledge Navigator]]" video portrayed an image of a relationship between end-users and agents. Being an ideal first, this field experienced a series of unsuccessful top-down implementations, instead of a piece-by-piece, bottom-up approach. The range of agent types is now (from 1990) broad: WWW, search engines, etc.