CS 63

Knowledge-Based
Agents
Chapter 7.1-7.3
Some material adopted from notes and
slides by Tim Finin, Marie desJardins,
Andreas Geyer-Schulz and Chuck Dyer 1
 A knowledge-based agent
• A knowledge-based agent includes a knowledge base and an
inference system.
• A knowledge base is a set of representations of facts of the
world.
• Each individual representation is called a sentence.
• The sentences are expressed in a knowledge representation
language.
• The agent operates as follows:
1. It TELLs the knowledge base what it perceives.
2. It ASKs the knowledge base what action it should perform.
3. It performs the chosen action.

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 Architecture of a
knowledge-based agent
• Knowledge Level.
– The most abstract level: describe agent by saying what it knows.
– Example: A taxi agent might know that the Golden Gate Bridge
connects San Francisco with the Marin County.
• Logical Level.
– The level at which the knowledge is encoded into sentences.
– Example: Links(GoldenGateBridge, SanFrancisco, MarinCounty).
• Implementation Level.
– The physical representation of the sentences in the logical level.
– Example: ‘(links goldengatebridge sanfrancisco
marincounty)

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The Wumpus World environment
• The Wumpus computer game
• The agent explores a cave consisting of rooms connected by
passageways.
• Lurking somewhere in the cave is the Wumpus, a beast that
eats any agent that enters its room.
• Some rooms contain bottomless pits that trap any agent that
wanders into the room.
• Occasionally, there is a heap of gold in a room.
• The goal is to collect the gold and exit the world without
being eaten

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 A typical Wumpus world

• The agent always

starts in the field
[1,1].
• The task of the
agent is to find the
gold, return to the
field [1,1] and
climb out of the
cave.

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Agent in a Wumpus world: Percepts
• The agent perceives
– a stench in the square containing the wumpus and in the adjacent
squares (not diagonally)
– a breeze in the squares adjacent to a pit
– a glitter in the square where the gold is
– a bump, if it walks into a wall
– a woeful scream everywhere in the cave, if the wumpus is killed
• The percepts are given as a five-symbol list. If there is a stench and
a breeze, but no glitter, no bump, and no scream, the percept is
[Stench, Breeze, None, None, None]

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 Wumpus world actions
• go forward
• turn right 90 degrees
• turn left 90 degrees
• grab: Pick up an object that is in the same square as the agent
• shoot: Fire an arrow in a straight line in the direction the agent is facing.
The arrow continues until it either hits and kills the wumpus or hits the
outer wall. The agent has only one arrow, so only the first Shoot action
has any effect
• climb is used to leave the cave. This action is only effective in the start
square
• die: This action automatically and irretrievably happens if the agent
enters a square with a pit or a live wumpus

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 Wumpus goal
The agent’s goal is to find the gold and bring it back
to the start square as quickly as possible, without
getting killed
– 1000 points reward for climbing out of the cave
with the gold
– 1 point deducted for every action taken
– 10000 points penalty for getting killed

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The Wumpus agent’s first step

¬W

¬W

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 Later

¬W
¬W
¬P ¬P

¬W ¬W

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Let’s Play!

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 Wumpuses online
• http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/code/doc/overview-AG
ENTS.html
– Lisp version from Russell & Norvig
• http://scv.bu.edu/htbin/wcl –
Web-based version you can play
• http://codenautics.com/wumpus/ –
downloadable Mac version

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 Representation, reasoning, and logic

• The object of knowledge representation is to express knowledge

in a computer-tractable form, so that agents can perform well.
• A knowledge representation language is defined by:
– its syntax, which defines all possible sequences of symbols
that constitute sentences of the language.
• Examples: Sentences in a book, bit patterns in computer memory.
– its semantics, which determines the facts in the world to
which the sentences refer.
• Each sentence makes a claim about the world.
• An agent is said to believe a sentence about the world.

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 The connection between
sentences and facts

Semantics maps sentences in logic to facts in the world.

The property of one fact following from another is mirrored
by the property of one sentence being entailed by another.
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 Soundness and completeness
• A sound inference method derives only entailed sentences.
• Analogous to the property of completeness in search, a
complete inference method can derive any sentence that is
entailed.

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 Logic as a KR language

Multi-valued Modal Temporal Non-monotonic

Logic Logic
Higher Order
Probabilistic
Logic First Order

Fuzzy Propositional Logic

Logic

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 Ontology and epistemology

• Ontology is the study of what there is—an inventory of what

exists. An ontological commitment is a commitment to an
existence claim.
• Epistemology is a major branch of philosophy that concerns the
forms, nature, and preconditions of knowledge.

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No independent access to the world
• The reasoning agent often gets its knowledge about the facts of
the world as a sequence of logical sentences and must draw
conclusions only from them without independent access to the
world.
• Thus it is very important that the agent’s reasoning is sound!

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 Summary
• Intelligent agents need knowledge about the world for making good
decisions.
• The knowledge of an agent is stored in a knowledge base in the form of
sentences in a knowledge representation language.
• A knowledge-based agent needs a knowledge base and an inference
mechanism. It operates by storing sentences in its knowledge base,
inferring new sentences with the inference mechanism, and using them
to deduce which actions to take.
• A representation language is defined by its syntax and semantics,
which specify the structure of sentences and how they relate to the facts
of the world.
• The interpretation of a sentence is the fact to which it refers. If this
fact is part of the actual world, then the sentence is true.

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