zen_tom

Hi,
I'm looking at making a system that will operate as a bunch of different 'agents'. Each agent will do a specific task. There might be one or a hundred of each specific type of agents. They might talk to one another in order to decide what to do next.

So, how can I control the creation of these agents?

What I mean is, I want each one to run as a separate Java application. Yes, they could each be a thread, but I figure that would take up a lot of memory if there were thousands of them. I also want the system to be able to operate over more than one computer at a time, so want each agent to be as autonomous as possible.

Secondly, any ideas on how to get the agents to talk to one another? There are some nice TCP/IP routines in Java, but I'm not sure if there's not something that might be better. Remember, I want thousands of these things running, so don't want to swamp the network with lots of inter-agent talk if I can get away with it.