Intelligent Agents

Outline

• Defining AI – Different Approaches

• Evolution of AI
• Types of AI
• Applications of AI
• Agents and Environment
• Intelligent Systems
• Production Systems
• Well-defined Problems and Solutions

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 Learning Outcomes

By the end of this lecture, the students should be able to:

• Define AI
• Categorize AI
• Learn different applications of AI
• Map applications to Agents and Environment
• Classify different types of environment
• Define Intelligent Systems

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 Artificial Intelligence

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 Evolution of Artificial Intelligence
• The birth of artificial intelligence 1952–1956
• Dartmouth Conference 1956: the birth of AI
• The golden years 1956–1974
• Reasoning as search
• Natural language
• The money
• Robotics
• The first AI winter 1974–1980
• Reduced Govt. funds
• Boom 1980–1987
• The rise of expert systems
• The knowledge revolution
• The money returns: the Fifth Generation project
• The revival of connectionism
• Artificial neural network (ANN)
• Bust: the second AI winter 1987–1993
• AI winter
• The importance of having a body: nouvelle AI and embodied reason
• AI 1993–2011
• Milestones and Moore's law
• Intelligent agents
• AI behind the scenes
• Predictions
• Deep learning, big data and artificial general intelligence: 2011–present
 Types of Artificial Intelligence
• Weak AI
• Weak AI is also known as narrow AI. It is an AI system that is designed and
trained for a specific type of task.
• For example – Siri and Alexa are weak AI. This categorization happens with
the help of unsupervised programming.
• Strong AI
• Strong AI is more like the human brain and is also known as artificial
general intelligence.
• It has cognitive abilities that help to perform unfamiliar tasks and commands.
It can find the solution to a problem and works beyond a preprogrammed
algorithm.
• Visual perception, speech recognition, decision making, and translations
between languages, are all examples of strong AI.
• Super AI
• Super AI is AI that surpasses human intelligence and ability. It’s also known
as artificial superintelligence (ASI) or superintelligence. It’s the best at
everything — maths, science, medicine, hobbies, you name it. Even the
brightest human minds cannot come close to the abilities of super AI.

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 Applications of AI

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 Applications of AI
Mundane Tasks
Expert Tasks
Perception Engineering
Vision Design
Speech Fault finding
Natural language Manufacturing planning
Understanding Scientific analysis
Generation Medical diagnosis
Translation Financial analysis

Commonsense reasoning
Robot control
Formal Tasks
Games
Chess
Backgammon
Checkers – Go
Mathematics
Geometry
Logic
Integral Calculus
Proving properties of programs

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 Agents & Environment
• An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through
sensors and acting upon that environment through actuators.

• 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.
• We use the term percept to refer to the agent's perceptual inputs at any given
instant.
• An agent's percept sequence is the complete history of everything the agent has
ever perceived. In general, an agent's choice of action at any given instant can
depend on the entire percept sequence observed to date, but not on anything it
hasn't perceived.

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 Perception – Action Model

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 Tabulating the Agent Function
 Mathematically speaking, we say that an agent's behavior is
AGENT FUNCTION - that maps any given percept sequence to
an action
 It’s an abstract mathematical description
 Table – the external characterization of the Agent
 Internally, the agent function for an artificial agent will be
implemented by an Agent Program

 Ex. Vacuum Cleaner

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 Good Behaviour
 A rational agent is one that does the right thing—
conceptually speaking, every entry in the table for the
agent function is filled out correctly. Obviously, doing
the right thing is better than doing the wrong thing.

 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.

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 Good Behaviour (Contd.,)

 An omniscient agent knows the actual outcome of its

actions and can act accordingly; but omniscience is
impossible in reality.
 Rational agent not only gathers information but also
learns as much as possible from what it perceives. The
agent's initial configuration could reflect sonic prior
knowledge of the environment
 Autonomy - A rational agent should be autonomous—it
should learn what it can to compensate for partial or
incorrect prior knowledge

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 The Nature of Environments
 In our discussion of the rationality of the simple vacuum-cleaner
agent, we had to specify the performance measure, the
environment, and the agent's actuators and sensors. We group all
these under the heading of the task environment.
 For the acronymically minded, we call this as the PEAS
(Performance, Environment, Actuators, Sensors) description. In
designing an agent, the first step must always be to specify the task
environment as fully as possible.
 The vacuum world was a simple example; let us consider a more complex
problem: an automated taxi driver.
 The full driving task is extremely open-ended. There is no limit to the
novel combinations of circumstances that can arise.

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 PEAS description of the task environment for an
automated taxi

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Examples of agent types and their PEAS descriptions

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 Different types of Environment

 Fully observable vs. partially observable

 Single agent Vs. Multi agent
 Deterministic Vs. Stochastic
 Episodic Vs. Sequential
 Static vs. Dynamic
 Discrete vs. Continuous
 Known vs. Unknown

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Examples of task environments and their characteristics

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 Intelligent Systems

1. Define the problem precisely

2. Analyze the problem
3. Isolate and represent the task knowledge that is
necessary to solve the problem
4. Choose the best problem-solving techniques and apply it
to the particular problem.
5. The state space representation forms the basis of most of
the AI methods.

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 Formal Description of the problem
1. Define a state space that contains all the possible
configurations of the relevant objects.
2. Specify one or more states within that space that
describe possible situations from which the problem
solving process may start ( initial state)
3. Specify one or more states that would be acceptable as
solutions to the problem( goal states)
4. Specify a set of rules that describe the actions
(operations) available.

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 Production Systems
A production system consists of:
• A set of rules, each consisting of a left side that determines the
applicability of the rule and a right side that describes the operation to
be performed if that rule is applied.
• One or more knowledge/databases that contain whatever
information is appropriate for the particular task. Some parts of the
database may be permanent, while other parts of it may pertain only
to the solution of the current problem.
• A control strategy that specifies the order in which the rules will be
compared to the database and a way of resolving the conflicts that
arise when several rules match at once.
• A rule applier

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 Well-defined problems and solutions
A problem can be defined formally by five components:
• INITIAL STATE : The initial state that the agent starts in
• ACTIONS: A description of the possible actions available to
the agent Given a particular state s, ACTIONS(s) returns the
set of actions that can be executed in s.
• Transition Model: That represents a description of what each
action does.
– Successor : Any state reachable from a given state by a single action.
– State Space : Initial State + Actions + Transition Model.
– Graph : A directed Graph in which the nodes are states and the links
between nodes are actions.

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 Well-defined problems and solutions (Contd.,)
• Goal Test : Determines whether a given state is a goal state
or not.
• Path Cost : Its a function that assigns a numeric cost to
each path. The problem solving agent chooses a cost
function that reflects its own performance measure.
– Step Cost : Taking step ‘a’ in state ‘s’ to reach state ‘s1’. The
function can be denoted by C(s, a, s1).

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 PROBLEM EXAMPLES (CASE STUDY)

• Toy Problems
• 8-PUZZLE PROBLEM
• 8-QUEENS PROBLEM
• Real World Problems
• ROUTE FINDING PROBLEM
• TRAVELLING SALESPERSON PROBLEM
• ROBOT NAVIGATION

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 SEARCHING FOR SOLUTIONS

A solution is an action sequence, so search algorithms work

by considering various action sequences. It can be
implemented using search tree.
• SEARCH TREE: The possible action sequences starting at
the initial state form a search tree with the initial state at
the root; the branches are actions and the nodes
correspond to states in the state space of the problem

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SEARCHING FOR SOLUTIONS (Contd.,)
 SEARCHING FOR SOLUTIONS (Contd.,)

• FRONTIER: A set of all the leaf nodes available for

expansion at any given point.
Generally, it is considered as open list
• EXPLORED SET: A set of nodes that are already
explored. Generally the data structure is known as
Close List.

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 Infrastructure for search algorithms

Search algorithms require a data structure to keep track of

the search tree that is being constructed. For each node n of
the tree, we have a structure that contains four
Components:
• n.STATE: the state in the state space to which the node
corresponds
• n.PARENT: the node in the search tree that generated this
node
• n.ACTION: the action that was applied to the parent to
generate the node
• n.PATH-COST: the cost, traditionally denoted by g(n), of
the path from the initial state to the node, as indicated by the
 Measuring problem-solving performance

We can evaluate an algorithm's performance in four ways:

• Completeness: Is the algorithm guaranteed to find a
solution when there is one?
• Optimality: Does the strategy find the optimal solution
• Time complexity: How long does it take to find a solution?
• Space complexity: How much memory is needed to
perform the search?

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 Thank You
Suggestions ….

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