Abstract Current Information Technology is mostly focused on accessing information and provides little support for processing information. An exponentially growing amount of information becomes increasingly unmanageable with today's information technology approaches. Through web portals, emails, chat rooms, and news lists all kinds of information can be accessed everywhere, all the time. The ability to access information is a crucial first step but now we need to explore new means of processing information.
Simulation is a form of information processing.
Agents can be used to build interactive simulations. Interactive simulations can help people to explore complex issues and communicate them to other people effectively. Interactive simulations are more engaging than static text, images and even video. Moreover, people can define the behavior of end-user programmable agents to access existing information such as stock ticker symbols and to process that information by analyzing and synthesizing it.