Fixed the wrong section numbers and frame problem description.
Informally, we can assume that some description of the world is given by context and view a task as something specified by an initial state and an end state (or states) - accomplishing the task amounts to causing a transformation from the starting state to one of the desired end states.
I feel like this definition is not capturing what I mean by a “task”. Many “agent-like” things, such as “become supreme ruler of the world”, seem like tasks according to this definition; many useless things like “twitching randomly” can be thought of as completing a “task” as defined here and so would be counted as “services”.
Could it be that the problem is not in the “task” part but in the definition service? If I consider the task of building me a house that I will like, I can envision a very service-like way of doing that (ask me a bunch of routine questions, select house-model correspondingly, then proceed to build it in a cook-book manner by calling on other services). But I can also imagine going about this in a very agent-like manner.
(Also, “twitching randomly” seems like a perfectly valid task, and a twitch-bot as a perfectly valid service. Just a very stupid one that nobody would want to build or pay for. Uhm, probably. Hopefully.)
It seems like what you’re trying to get at is some notion of a difference between a service and an agent. My objection is primarily that the specific definitions you chose don’t seem to point at the essential differences between a service and an agent. I don’t have a strong opinion as to whether the problem is with the definition of “task” or of “service”; just that together they don’t seem to point at the right thing.
Fixed the wrong section numbers and frame problem description.
Could it be that the problem is not in the “task” part but in the definition service? If I consider the task of building me a house that I will like, I can envision a very service-like way of doing that (ask me a bunch of routine questions, select house-model correspondingly, then proceed to build it in a cook-book manner by calling on other services). But I can also imagine going about this in a very agent-like manner.
(Also, “twitching randomly” seems like a perfectly valid task, and a twitch-bot as a perfectly valid service. Just a very stupid one that nobody would want to build or pay for. Uhm, probably. Hopefully.)
It seems like what you’re trying to get at is some notion of a difference between a service and an agent. My objection is primarily that the specific definitions you chose don’t seem to point at the essential differences between a service and an agent. I don’t have a strong opinion as to whether the problem is with the definition of “task” or of “service”; just that together they don’t seem to point at the right thing.