Just as a user directs a web browser to "visit" a website (the browser merely downloads a copy of the site, or one version of it in the case of dynamic web sites), a mobile agent accomplishes a move through data duplication.
However, in contrast to the remote evaluation and code on demand programming paradigms, mobile agents are active in that they can choose to migrate between computers at any time during their execution.
This makes them a powerful tool for implementing distributed applications in a computer network.
In the early 1990s, General Magic created the Telescript language and environment for writing and executing mobile agents, and described it with the now-popular "cloud" metaphor; as described by Andy Hertzfeld: "The beauty of Telescript," says Andy, "is that now, instead of just having a device to program, we now have the entire Cloud out there, where a single program can go and travel to many different sources of information and create a sort of a virtual service.
Some advantages which mobile agents have over conventional agents are: One particular advantage for remote deployment of software includes increased portability thereby making system requirements less influential.