An empirical study of cognitive agent programs

Abstract

Various agent programming languages and frameworks have been developed by now, but very few systematic studies have been done as to how the elements in these languages may be and are in fact used in practice. Performing a study of these aspects contributes to the design of instruments for facilitating development of high-quality agent programs, namely programming language, programming guidelines and teaching methods, and development environment. In this paper we propose an approach for empirically studying how programmers use a programming language, in which we identify several analysis dimensions. We perform two case studies in which we analyze agent programs written in the GOAL agent programming language along the identified dimensions. The case studies concern programs for the dynamic Blocks World and for controlling bots in the first-person shooter game UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004. We evaluate our experimental setup and discuss to what extent our findings generalize to other cognitive agent programming languages. This provides insight into more practical aspects of the development of agent programs, and forms the basis for improvement of instruments for facilitating agent development.

Novice programmers' faults & failures in GOAL programs: Empirical observations and lessons

“…Our work is complementary to van Riemsdijk et al's [11] analysis of how GOAL was used. They did not study faults and failures, but rather, considered programming style, and usage of features of the language.…”

“…More recent 1 is the work of van Riemsdijk et al [11]. They considered a collection of GOAL programs written by programmers (some novice, some more experienced).…”

Novice programmers' faults & failures in GOAL programs: Empirical observations and lessons

“…There has been very little work that has investigated agent-oriented software development empirically, and very little is known about how AOPLs are used in practice. Indeed, only recently van Riemsdijk et al [11] called for more work in this area, arguing that in addition to using so-called "formulative" approaches in developing agent languages, the time has come to also adopt an empirical perspective.…”