I think the problem is that I currently don't have a strong enough grasp of the definition of 'agent' to identify one, as yet; so I have no idea whether the handful of suggestions I've come up with thus far are viable or not.

Agreed on this count. His lumping together of a whole bunch of dumb scripts into the nicely-vague category "Internet Agent" makes my brain ache. In this case he treats scripts (say, a web spider, that starts at one page and looks at every page that is linked from there) as agents, so long as it has a tiny bit of "logic" (if THIS condition then DO THAT, if THAT then DO THIS OTHER THING, ... A small bunch of conditions that supposed make these things "smart") to govern it.

Unfortunately, that means that pretty much everything other than "Hello World" is an Agent to him. Fuck.

(As a side note: Rob, can you give me an example of where the "mobility" one would be useful? I can see that it might be, but I'm still trying to grasp it and failing...)

Umm... A worm, in the virus/trojan sense of the word. Based on a few conditions for propogation (eg. is the date right, is there a host I can infect, etc) the worm connects to another host, and via a defect in the server on the other end, can replicate itself on another machine, and do whatever its creator wanted it to do.

A historical example of a mobile agent is the Morris Worm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm).
Broken down into more detail here (more or less plain English): http://snowplow.org/tom/worm/worm.html

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defect in a server*, rather.

The server basically being anything that's listening that the worm can talk to, eg. a webserver, FTP server, etc.

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[It] can replicate itself on another machine, and do whatever its creator wanted it to do.

...Except that he was implying that it didn't leave behind copies of itself as it went (Or didn't HAVE to, anyway).

In the "duplication" thing, I can see, say, a mass network-based Ghost install, to some extent - though that mostly implies a client-server relationship, that's refuted in the notes.

But not leaving it behind? How would you determine whether Machine X has run the program? And what's the advantage? (Or am I misinterpreting what he's said?)

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...Except that he was implying that it didn't leave behind copies of itself as it went (Or didn't HAVE to, anyway).

Which be easily remedied by having the worm delete copies of itself after it's finished copying itself to another machine. Most (worms) don't in the real world, because there's no real point.

But not leaving it behind? How would you determine whether Machine X has run the program? And what's the advantage?

No idea. For neatness' sake? :\

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having the worm delete itself*

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