I know of them as "intelligent software agents", as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent . They were part

I know of them as "intelligent software agents", as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent . They were part of marketing hype in the dot-com era. At least, our company had a product with the slogan "the first intelligent agent for bioinformatics", or something like that. W00t! Traces of it are still on line. See http://www.genomeweb.com/informatics/microbial-genomics-array-techs-highlight-genome-conference http://www.genomeweb.com/informatics/microbial-genomics-arra... , from 1998. Like most articles concerning futurists, this one doesn't cover the decades of previous attempts which would suggest that the task is much more difficult than the optimistic 5 year prediction.