Emily B.

Yuson
 AnAI system is composed of an agent and its
environment. The agents act in their
environment. The environment may contain
other agents.
 Anagent is anything that can perceive its
environment through sensors and acts upon
that environment through effectors.
 A human agent has sensory organs such as
eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin parallel to
the sensors, and other organs such as hands,
legs, mouth, for effectors.

A robotic agent replaces cameras and

infrared range finders for the sensors, and
various motors and actuators for effectors.
 A software agent has encoded bit strings as
its programs and actions.
 Performance Measure of Agent: It is the
criteria, which determines how successful an
agent is.

 Behavior of Agent: It is the action that

agent performs after any given sequence of
percepts.
 Percept: It is agent’s perceptual inputs at a
given instance.

 Percept Sequence: It is the history of all

that an agent has perceived till date.

 Agent Function: It is a map from the precept

sequence to an action.
 Rationality
is nothing but status of being
reasonable, sensible, and having good sense
of judgment.

 Rationality
is concerned with expected
actions and results depending upon what the
agent has perceived. Performing actions with
the aim of obtaining useful information is an
important part of rationality.
 An ideal rational agent is the one, which is
capable of doing expected actions to
maximize its performance measure, on the
basis of:

 Its percept sequence

 Its built-in knowledge base
 Rationality of an agent depends on the
following:

1. The performance measures, which

determine the degree of success.

2. Agent’s Percept Sequence till now.

3. The agent’s prior knowledge about the
environment.

4. The actions that the agent can carry out.

A rational agent always performs right
action, where the right action means the
action that causes the agent to be most
successful in the given percept sequence.

The problem the agent solves is characterized

by Performance Measure, Environment,
Actuators, and Sensors (PEAS).
Agent’s structure can be viewed as:

• Agent = Architecture + Agent Program

• Architecture = the machinery that an agent

executes on.

• Agent Program = an implementation of an

agent function
 They choose actions only based on the
current percept.

 They are rational only if a correct decision is

made only on the basis of current precept.

 Their environment is completely observable.

Condition-Action Rule – It is a rule that maps a

state (condition) to an action
Model-Based Reflex Agents

They use a model of the world to choose their

actions. They maintain an internal state.
Model: knowledge about “how the things
happen in the world”.
 Internal
State: It is a representation of
unobserved aspects of current state
depending on percept history.

Updating state requires the information about

How the world evolves.
How the agent’s actions affect the world.
 They choose their actions in order to achieve
goals. Goal-based approach is more flexible
than reflex agent since the knowledge
supporting a decision is explicitly modeled,
thereby allowing for modifications.
 Goal: It is the description of desirable
situations.
 They choose actions based on a preference
(utility) for each state.
 Goals are inadequate when:

- There are conflicting goals only some of

which can be achieved.

- Goals have some uncertainty of being

achieved and one needs to weigh likelihood of
success against the importance of a goal.
 Some programs operate in the entirely artificial
environment confined to keyboard input,
database, computer file systems and character
output on a screen.
 In contrast, some software agents (software
robots or softbots) exist in rich, unlimited
softbots domains. The simulator has a very
detailed, complex environment. The software
agent needs to choose from a long array of
actions in real time. A softbot designed to scan
the online preferences of the customer and show
interesting items to the customer works in the
real as well as an artificial environment.
 The most famous artificial environment is
the Turing Test environment, in which one
real and other artificial agents are tested on
equal ground. This is a very challenging
environment as it is highly difficult for a
software agent to perform as well as a
human.
 The success of an intelligent behavior of a
system can be measured with Turing Test.
Two persons and a machine to be evaluated
participate in the test. Out of the two
persons, one plays the role of the tester.
Each of them sits in different rooms. The
tester is unaware of who is machine and who
is a human. He interrogates the questions by
typing and sending them to both
intelligences, to which he receives typed
responses.
 This test aims at fooling the tester. If the
tester fails to determine machine’s response
from the human response, then the machine
is said to be intelligent
The environment has multifold properties:

Discrete / Continuous: If there are a limited

number of distinct, clearly defined, states of
the environment, the environment is discrete
(For example, chess); otherwise it is
continuous (For example, driving).
 Observable / Partially Observable: If it is
possible to determine the complete state of
the environment at each time point from the
percepts it is observable; otherwise it is only
partially observable.
 Static / Dynamic: If the environment does
not change while an agent is acting, then it
is static; otherwise it is dynamic.
 Singleagent / Multiple agents: The
environment may contain other agents which
may be of the same or different kind as that
of the agent.
 Accessiblevs. inaccessible: If the agent’s
sensory apparatus can have access to the
complete state of the environment, then the
environment is accessible to that agent.
 Deterministic vs. Non-deterministic: If the
next state of the environment is completely
determined by the current state and the
actions of the agent, then the environment is
deterministic; otherwise it is non-
deterministic.
 Episodic vs. Non-episodic: In an episodic
environment, each episode consists of the
agent perceiving and then acting. The quality
of its action depends just on the episode
itself. Subsequent episodes do not depend on
the actions in the previous episodes. Episodic
environments are much simpler because the
agent does not need to think ahead.