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 CHAPTER 2
INTELLIGENT
AGENTS
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 AGENT
An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment
through sensors and acting upon that environment through actuators.

percept sequence is the complete history of everything the agent

has ever perceived.

agent function that maps any given percept

sequence to an action.
VACUUM-CLEANER WORLD
 GOOD BEHAVIOR: THE CONCEPT OF RATIONALITY

rational agent is one that does the right thing

what does it mean to do the right thing?

we will say that the right action is the one that will cause the agent to be most successful

performance measure evaluates any given sequence of environment states.

A performance measure embodies the criterion for success of an agent's behavior.

This sequence of actions causes the environment to go through a sequence of states.
If the sequence is desirable, then the agent has performed well.
 RATIONALITY
What is rational at any given time depends on four things:
✓ The performance measure that defines the criterion of success.
✓ The agent's prior knowledge of the environment.
✓ The actions that the agent can perform.
✓ The agent's percept sequence to date.

This leads to a definition of a rational agent:

For each possible percept sequence, a rational agent should select an action that is expected
to maximize its performance measure, given the evidence provided by the percept sequence
and whatever built-in knowledge the agent has.
 OMNISCIENT
An omniscient agent knows the actual outcome of its actions and can act accordingly.

Is impossible in reality

rationality is not the same as perfection.

Rationality maximizes expected performance, while

perfection maximizes actual performance.

To the extent that an agent relies on the prior knowledge of its designer rather than on its
own percepts, we say that the agent lacks autonomy.

A rational agent should be autonomous

it should learn what it can to compensate for partial or incorrect prior knowledge.

it would be reasonable to provide an artificial intelligent agent with some initial

knowledge as well as an ability to learn.

After sufficient experience of its environment, the behavior of a rational agent can
become effectively independent of its prior knowledge.
 TASK ENVIRONMENTS
we had to specify the
❖ Performance measure,
❖ Environment,
❖ agent's Actuators
❖ agent's Sensors

We will group all these together under the heading of the task environment.

we call this the PEAS (Performance, Environment, Actuators, Sensors) description.

 ENVIRONMENT TYPES

Fully observable & partially observable

➢ Fully observable : If an agent's sensors give it access to the complete state of the
environment at each point in time

➢ An environment might be partially observable because of noisy and inaccurate sensors

or because parts of the state are simply missing from the sensor data

for example, a vacuum agent with only a local dirt sensor cannot tell whether there is dirt in
other squares
 EPISODIC & SEQUENTIAL
In an episodic task environment, the agent's experience is divided into
atomic episodes.

Each episode consists of the agent perceiving and then performing a single action.

In episodic environments, the choice of action in each episode depends only on the
episode itself. Many classification tasks are episodic

In sequential environments, on the other hand, the current decision could affect all
future decisions.

Episodic environments are much simpler than sequential environments because the
agent does not need to think ahead.
 SINGLE-AGENT & MULTIAGENT

➢ Competitive multi-agent environment :In chess, the opponent entity B is trying to

maximize its performance measure, which, by the rules of chess, minimizes agent A's
performance measure.

➢ Cooperative multi-agent environment : In the taxi-driving environment avoiding

collisions maximizes the performance measure of all agents for example, a vacuum agent
with only a local dirt sensor cannot tell whether there is dirt in other squares
 DETERMINISTIC & NONDETERMINISTIC

Deterministic : If the next state of the environment is completely determined by the current
state and the action executed by the agent

➢ If the environment is partially observable, however, then it could appear to be

stochastic.

➢ If the environment is deterministic except for the actions of other agents, we say that
the environment is strategic.
 STATIC & DYNAMIC

if the environment can change while an agent is deliberating, then we say the environment is
dynamic

for that agent; otherwise, it is static.

If the environment itself does not change with the passage of time but the agent's
performance score does, then we say the environment is semi-dynamic.
 DISCRETE & CONTINUOUS

The discrete/continuous distinction can be applied to the state of the environment, to the
way time is handled, and to the percepts and actions of the agent.
 THE STRUCTURE OF AGENTS

The job of AI is to design the agent program that implements the agent function mapping
percepts to actions.

Architecture : this program will run on some sort of computing device with physical sensors
and actuators.

agent = architecture + program .

In the remainder of this section, we outline four basic kinds of agent programs
that embody

the principles underlying almost all intelligent systems:

● Simple reflex agents;

● Model-based reflex agents;

● Goal-based agents; and

● Utility-based agents.
 SIMPLE REFLEX AGENTS

The simplest kind of agent is the simple reflex agent.

These agents select actions on the basis of the current percept, ignoring the rest of the
percept history.
For example, the vacuum agent is a simple reflex agent
 MODEL-BASED REFLEX AGENTS

The most effective way to handle partial observability is for the agent to keep track of the
part of the world it can't see now.

• That is, the agent should maintain some sort of internal state that depends on the
percept history

In order to update this internal state we need 2 things:

1. Information on how the world evolves on its own.
2. How the world is affected by the agents actions.
 GOAL-BASED REFLEX AGENTS

Knowing about the current state of the environment is not always enough to decide what to
do.
• For example, at a road junction, the taxi can turn left, turn right, or go straight on.

• The correct decision depends on where the taxi is trying to get to.

• the agent needs some sort of goal information that

describes situations that are desirable

for example, being at the passenger's destination.

 UTILITY-BASED REFLEX AGENTS

Goals alone are not really enough to generate high-quality behavior in most environments.

• For example, there are many action sequences that will get the taxi to its destination
(thereby achieving the goal) but some are quicker, safer, more reliable, or cheaper than
other

• Goals just provide a crude binary distinction between "happy" and "unhappy" states.
• A utility function maps a state
(or a sequence of states) onto a real number,
which describes the associated degree of
happiness.
 LEARNING AGENTS

Learning allows the agent: to operate in initially unknown environments and to become
more competent

• A learning agent can be divided into four conceptual components:

• learning element, which is responsible for making improvements. The learning element
uses feedback from the critic on how the agent is
doing and determines how the performance element
should be modified to do better in the future.

• performance element, which is responsible

for selecting external actions
 SUMMARY

An agent is something that perceives and acts in an environment. The agent function for an agent
specifies the action taken by the agent in response to any percept sequence.
The performance measure evaluates the behavior of the agent in an environment. A rational agent acts
so as to maximize the expected value of the performance measure, given the percept sequence it has
seen so far.
A task environment specification includes the performance measure, the external environment, the
actuators, and the sensors. In designing an agent, the first step must always be to specify the task
environment as fully as possible.
Task environments vary along several significant dimensions. They can be fully or partially observable,
single-agent or multiagent, deterministic or nondeterministic, episodic or sequential, static or dynamic
 SUMMARY

In cases where the performance measure is unknown or hard to specify correctly, there is a significant
risk of the agent optimizing the wrong objective. In such cases the agent design should reflect
uncertainty about the true objective.
The agent program implements the agent function. There exists a variety of basic agent program designs
reflecting the kind of information made explicit and used in the decision process. The designs vary in
efficiency, compactness, and flexibility. The appropriate design of the agent program depends on the
nature of the environment.
Simple reflex agents respond directly to percepts, whereas model-based reflex agents maintain internal
state to track aspects of the world that are not evident in the current percept. Goal-based agents act to
achieve their goals, and utility-based agents try to maximize their own expected “happiness.”
All agents can improve their performance through learning.