Agents

An entity that perceives the environment and acts accordingly. Expected to operate autonomously and adapt to change.

All skills required to pass the Turing test allows the agent to act rationally.

Percept sequence

The complete history of everything an agent has perceived.

Agent function

Maps an agent’s percept sequence to an action.

Agent program

An implementation of agent function. Maps percepts to actions. Can be considered as the brain of the agent. Dicussed more in depth in its own page.

Agent architecture

The computing device with physical sensors and actuators on which the agent program runs.

An agent program’s effectiveness is measured through a performance measure. An agent is the combination of the agent program and the agent architecture.

Autonomous

When an agent’s actions depend more on its experience compared to the built-in knowledge.

Rational agent

An agent that acts as to achieve the best outcome when there is uncertainty. Built to do the right thing. The right thing is the objective that is provided to the agent.

Perfect rationality is not feasible in complex environments because of the computational demands. Limited rationality is aimed in that case.

The right thing to do at a given time depends on:

• performance measure
• percept sequence
• agent’s understanding of the environment
• the possible actions by the agent

Definition

For each possible percept sequence, a rational should select an action, to maximize the performance measure, given the evidence provided by the percept sequence and its built-in knowledge.