Lecture #1 was an introduction to the course and to the general topic of intelligent agents and multiagent systems.
The slides I used for the introduction:
and the material on intelligent agents: are both available in two formats.
The text book suggests this paper as a class reading:
A. H. Bond and L. Gasser A Survey of Distributed Artificial Intelligence in Readings in Distributed Artificial INtelligence, (A. H. Bond and L. Gasser eds.) Morgan Kaufmann, San Matteo, CA, 1988.I also think that this following paper is well worth reading as an overview of the whole area of autonomous agents and mutiagent systems:
M. Wooldridge and N. R. Jennings. Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice, Knowledge Engineering Review 10(2), 1995.I assume the author of the textbook is just too modest to want to reference his own stuff, I can't see any other reason.