Article from The Mail On Sunday

August 6, 1995
British newspaper, circulation 6.5 million.


HITTING THE RIGHT NOTES

Computer scientists have dreamed for years of "intelligent agents" that can go forth and scour electronic networks for information on behalf of their owners.

Now the idea has become reality. Several new computer programs available on the Internet's World Wide Web help music enthusiasts to identify records they like and find the vendors offering them at the keenest prices.

BargainFinder, a computer program developed by Andersen Consulting, searches online record stores to find shops that sell a particular album--and its price.

The BargainFinder concept is not limited to music. In the future, software will provide price comparisons for a variety of products--which may mean that electronic commerce becomes far more prices sensitive than conventional retialing, particularly for mass-produced consumer products.

Jeff Leane, co-developer of BargainFinder, says that Andersen created the agent as an "experiment to learn about electronic commerce", and that it has "exceeded our wildest expectations. Several companies have expressed interest in it as a commercial service".

Other agents provide help for people who are not sure what music to buy. HOMR, developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate Max Metral, uses a technique called "social information filtering".

Tastes

Metral says: "It automates word-of-mouth." The program asks the user to rate a number of albums on a scale of one to seven.

It compares the user's responses with other people's, identifies those with similar tastes and then offers a list of albums these people have rated highly.

A more direct kind of recommendation comes from The Similarities Engine, a program which asks users to list their five favourite albums.

Within hours, the software sends electronic mail containing 50 related album recommendations. Developer David Whiteis intends that future versions "will recommend videos, video games and possibly more".

A page on the World Wide Web, Voyagers CDLink, illustrates how software can enrich the musical experience. Listeners browse the CDLink page on the information related to CDs they own. The page then offers a critque of the CD which can be read while the disc is in the computer's CD-ROM drive.

Where music leads, other industries are certain to follow. Whiteis predicts: "In the next few years we will see an explosion of new intelligent agents and similar systems.

"The systems will become so powerful that they will sometimes be unsettling to people, and one of the challenges we will face as a society will be determining what limits to put on these systems."

• Andersen Consulting's Web page: http://bf.cstar.ac.com/bf/
• HOMR Web page: http://homr.www.media.mit.edu/
• The Similarities Engine Web page: http://www.webcom.com/se
• Voyager's Web page: http://www.voyagerco.com/cdlink/cdlink.html

Thanks, Gerry McGovern!