Artificial Intelligence: Chapter 2 Agents

Artificial Intelligence: Chapter 2

Intelligent Agents

Chapter 1 identified the concept of rational agents as central to our approach to artificial intelligence. In this chapter, we make this notion more concrete. We will see that the concept of rationality can be applied to a wide variety of agents operating in any imaginable environment. Our plan in this book is to use this concept to develop a small set of design principles for building successful agents—systems that can reasonably be called intelligent.
 

We begin by examining agents, environments, and the coupling between them. The observation that some agents behave better than others leads naturally to the idea of a rational agent—one that behaves as well as possible. How well an agent can behave depends on the nature of the environment; some environments are more difficult than others. We give a crude categorization of environments and show how properties of an environment influence the design of suitable agents for that environment. We describe a number of basic “skeleton”
agent designs, which we flesh out in the rest of the book.

Anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through its effectors or actuators to maximize progress towards its goals.
 

What is an (Intelligent) Agent?

•A human agent has eyes, ears, and other organs for sensors and hands, legs, vocal track and so on for actuators

•A robotic agent might have cameras and infrared range finders for sensors and various motors for actuators. 

•A software agent receives keystrokes, file contents, and network packets as sensory inputs and acts on the environment by displaying on the screen, writing files, and sending network packets.

An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through actuators. This simple idea. A human agent has eyes, ears, and other organs for sensors and hands, legs, vocal tract, and so on for actuators. A robotic agent might have cameras and infrared range finders for sensors and various motors for actuators. A software agent receives keystrokes, file contents, and network packets as sensory inputs and acts on the environment by displaying on the screen, writing files, and sending network packets.

Lecture Contents

•Intelligent Agents (IA)

•Environment types

•IA Behavior

•IA Structure

•IA Types

Artificial Intelligence: Chapter 2 Week 2 and 3