Using the Agent Templates

FM has been equipped with a library of agent templates intended to help agent programmers to construct their own agents in either Java, C, or Lisp. The templates' documented code is available in the templates directory, and very interestingly, a set of agents' examples constructed out of these templates can also be found in the agentlib directory. These examples will surely constitute a good starting point for those who dare to program their agents. We must also mention that, in the particular case of the Java template, apart from the source code, the javadoc-generated documentation of its package is also available in the templates subdirectory of the html directory.

Before proceeding any further, we must stress the fact that the main goal pursued when designing the FM templates was to ease the task of programming new agents as much as possible. From this follows that agent builders can almost exclusively concentrate on the design of bidding strategies.

Next we go through the steps to be followed for adding a new agent once constructed.

First of all, open the Tournament Parameter Setting  panel, and select the Add option in the Buyers area. That will display the GUI in Table .

  
Table: Addition and Edition of Buyers.

At this point you must specify

• Source. Whether the agent is human (i.e. an agent that will participate through the buyer GUI) or it is a software agent (Java, Lisp, C, Exe).
• Login.
• Location.
  • Unnecessary for human agents.
  • Full path for Lisp, C and Exe agents (f.i. /home/fmuser/agentlib/CBuyer).
  • Only class name for Java  agents, but remember that the class name path must be added to the CLASSPATH environment variable.
• Machine. The machine where the agent will be spawned. This is unnecessary for human agents too, but quite useful for sotware agents because it allows to distribute your agents. Keep in mind, however, that in order to succeed in a remote connection you must have been guaranteed access to the remote machine (being a user), and, moreover, your environment variables must be set as explained through Section . Notice also that solely a single user can profit from this feature to distribute his agents. In Section we give the details about how to carry out a multi-user distribution.
• Parameters needed by the software agent.
• Automatic/Manual Start. Tick this option to request FM for automatically starting the agent. In order to guarantee that Lisp and Java  agents are correctly spawned, your path environment variable must include the path to your Java  and Clisp executable interpreters.

  The manual start of agents is specially convenient for tournaments involving humans and software agents owned by other users or simply agents that cannot be started automatically by FM (f.i. agents developed with the aid of an interpreted language). Anyhow the tournament (experiment) designer needs only to specify the participants' logins so that FM knows which agents are expected to request for participation. Complementarily, refer to Section  for a description of how different users' agents can remotely participate in tournaments.