Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had already happened--that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable...
-- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Earlier chapters showed that the discourse of computation is founded on a diverse set of metaphors, with anthropomorphic or animate metaphors playing a particularly central role. This chapter presents a series of agent-based systems and languages that are explicitly designed to exploit animate metaphors. Several implementations of agents within LiveWorld are presented here, ranging from extremely simple agents that have only implicit goals, to somewhat more complex agent systems that allow agents to have explicit goals and thus monitor their own activity, and finally to Dynamic Agents, a system which allows agents to dynamically create new goals and agents. This system is flexible enough to build agent systems that operate with a variety of control structures and can perform a variety of tasks in the problem domains set out in Chapter 1.