Terse (and technical) definitions of the term ``Mobile Agent''

• Kazuhiko Kato/University of Tsukuba
  Mobile agents are objects consisting of code, data and execution state that may go beyond protections domains.
  
  
• Gian Pietro Picco/Politecnico di Torino, and Giovanni Vigna/Politecnico di Milano
  A mobile agent is a component containing at least one thread of execution, which is able to autonomously migrate to a different site. A site is a component execution environment inside which inter-component communication is less expensive than communication among components residing on different sites.
  
  
• Christian Tschudin/University of Zurich
  A mobile agent is a thread of control which can trigger the transfer of arbitrary code to a remote computer such that: (i) this code has a chance to be executed remotely and independently, (ii) the resulting remote thread may trigger another code transfer.
  
  
• Jan Vitek/University of Geneva
  A mobile agent is a set of objects performing a computation on behalf of a user. This computation is performed within an agent execution platform which controls the execution of the agent. An agent may request to be moved causing its computation to be interrupted and resumed on another platform.
  
  

(Moderate technical) definitions of the term ``Mobile Agent'' collected elsewhere

• Jim White/General Magic (loose citation based on http://www.genmagic.com/Internet/Cap/w3c-paper.htm, March 1996)
  A mobile agent is a program: (i) that a person or organization vests with its authority, (ii) that can run unattended for a long time (e.g., a week), (iii) that can meet and interact with other agents (iv) and that can execute on different computer systems at different times of its life.
  
  
• Anonymous (in "Aufruf zur Teilnahme am 2. Deutschen Mobile-Agenten-Treffen", July 1996)
  Mobile agents are programs that - together with their data resources - can move in a computer network from host to host in order to go after their task.