A Qualitative Comparative Study between Posh and GOAL for Programming UT2004 Bots

A variety of agent programming languages have been proposed in the literature but only few comparative studies have been performed to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these languages. In order to gain a better understanding of the programming features and the use of these features by programmers it is imperative to perform studies on various programming tasks in these languages. Such studies advance our knowledge of the benefits of using agent-oriented languages and may contribute positively to the evolution of these languages. As a first step we perform an analysis of the submissions to the Multi-Agent Programming Contest. We look at common patterns, structures and methodologies used. Additionally a functional categorization is made to identify common structures in the agent program. We discover that participants favor modular abstractions and simple decision structures. Iterative methodologies seem to perform better. Based on these findings we provide a set of recommendations that agent programming languages should follow. We also use these findings to design the study which is the primary focus of this thesis. In this study we compare the performance of programmers on tasks that use the agent programming frameworks GOAL and POSH. The aim of the study was to investigate any differences in usability of the frameworks as well as differences between novice and more advanced programmers using either framework. The results suggest that there is no significant difference for the given tasks between both frameworks. We did find that general programming experience seems to be a relatively big advantage when using a (new) programming language. Analysis of the assignment and the observations made about the use of the frameworks, however, suggest that the experimental design can be adapted in such a way that differences in usability of the frameworks can be established.Computer ScienceInteractive InteligenceElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc