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CS8691 - ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

VI SEMESTER CSE
2017 Regulations

UNIT-I
UNIT I INTRODUCTION 9
Introduction–Definition - Future of Artificial Intelligence – Characteristics of
Intelligent Agents– Typical Intelligent Agents – Problem Solving Approach to
Typical AI problems.

1.1 INTRODUCTION
1.1.1 What is AI?
1.1.2 The foundations of Artificial Intelligence.
1.1.3 The History of Artificial Intelligence
1.1.4 The state of art

1.2 INTELLIGENT AGENTS

1.2.1 Agents and environments
1.2.2 Good behavior : The concept of rationality
1.2.3 The nature of environments
1.2.4 Structure of agents

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1.3 SOLVING PROBLEMS BY SEARCHING

1.3.1 Problem Solving Agents
1.3.1.1Well defined problems and solutions
1.3.2 Example problems
1.3.2.1 Toy problems
1.3.2.2 Real world problems
1.3.3 Searching for solutions
1.3.4 Uninformed search strategies
1.3.4.1 Breadth-first search
1.3.4.2 Uniform-cost search
1.3.4.3 Depth-first search
1.3.4.4 Depth limited search
1.3.4.5 Iterative-deepening depth first search
1.3.4.6 Bi-directional search
1.3.4.7 Comparing uninformed search strategies
1.3.5 Avoiding repeated states
1.3.6 Searching with partial information

1.1 Introduction to AI

1.1.1 What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence is the branch of computer science concerned with making computers
behave like humans.
Major AI textbooks define artificial intelligence as "the study and design of intelligent
agents," where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions
which maximize its chances of success. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as
"the science and engineering of making intelligent machines,especially intelligent computer
programs."
The definitions of AI according to some text books are categorized into four approaches and are
summarized in the table below :

Systems that think like humans Systems that think rationally

“The exciting new effort to make computers “The study of mental faculties through the use of
think … machines with minds,in the full and computer models.”
literal sense.”(Haugeland,1985) (Charniak and McDermont,1985)

Systems that act like humans Systems that act rationally

The art of creating machines that perform “Computational intelligence is the study of the
functions that require intelligence when design of intelligent agents.”(Poole et al.,1998)
performed by people.”(Kurzweil,1990)

The four approaches in more detail are as follows :

(a) Acting humanly : The Turing Test approach

o Test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950
o The computer is asked questions by a human interrogator.

The computer passes the test if a human interrogator,after posing some written questions,cannot tell
whether the written responses come from a person or not. Programming a computer to pass ,the
computer need to possess the following capabilities :

 Natural language processing to enable it to communicate successfully in English.

 Knowledge representation to store what it knows or hears
 Automated reasoning to use the stored information to answer questions and to draw
new conclusions.
  Machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate
patterns

To pass the complete Turing Test,the computer will need

 Computer vision to perceive the objects,and

 Robotics to manipulate objects and move about.

(b)Thinking humanly : The cognitive modeling approach

We need to get inside actual working of the human mind :
(a) through introspection – trying to capture our own thoughts as they go by;
(b) through psychological experiments
Allen Newell and Herbert Simon,who developed GPS,the “General Problem Solver”
tried to trace the reasoning steps to traces of human subjects solving the same problems.
The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science brings together computer models from AI
and experimental techniques from psychology to try to construct precise and testable
theories of the workings of the human mind

(c) Thinking rationally : The “laws of thought approach”

The Greek philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to attempt to codify “right
thinking”,that is irrefuatable reasoning processes. His syllogism provided patterns for argument
structures that always yielded correct conclusions when given correct premises—for
example,”Socrates is a man;all men are mortal;therefore Socrates is mortal.”.
These laws of thought were supposed to govern the operation of the mind;their study initiated a
field called logic.

(d) Acting rationally : The rational agent approach

An agent is something that acts. Computer agents are not mere programs ,but they are expected to
have the following attributes also : (a) operating under autonomous control, (b) perceiving their
environment, (c) persisting over a prolonged time period, (e) adapting to change.
A rational agent is one that acts so as to achieve the best outcome.

1.1.2 The foundations of Artificial Intelligence

The various disciplines that contributed ideas,viewpoints,and techniques to AI are given
below :
Philosophy(428 B.C. – present)
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) was the first to formulate a precise set of laws governing the rational part
of the mind. He developed an informal system of syllogisms for proper reasoning,which allowed
one to generate conclusions mechanically,given initial premises.

Computer Human Brain

8
Computational units 1 CPU,10 gates 1011 neurons
10
Storage units 10 bits RAM 1011 neurons
1011 bits disk 1014 synapses
-9
Cycle time 10 sec 10-3 sec
Bandwidth 1010 bits/sec 1014 bits/sec
9
Memory updates/sec 10 1014
Table 1.1 A crude comparison of the raw computational resources available to computers(circa
2003 ) and brain. The computer’s numbers have increased by at least by a factor of 10 every few
years. The brain’s numbers have not changed for the last 10,000 years.

Brains and digital computers perform quite different tasks and have different properties. Tablere 1.1
shows that there are 10000 times more neurons in the typical human brain than there are gates in
the CPU of a typical high-end computer. Moore’s Law predicts that the CPU’s gate count will equal
the brain’s neuron count around 2020.

Psycology(1879 – present)
The origin of scientific psychology are traced back to the wok if German physiologist Hermann von
Helmholtz(1821-1894) and his student Wilhelm Wundt(1832 – 1920)
In 1879,Wundt opened the first laboratory of experimental psychology at the university of Leipzig.
In US,the development of computer modeling led to the creation of the field of cognitive science.
The field can be said to have started at the workshop in September 1956 at MIT.

Computer engineering (1940-present)

For artificial intelligence to succeed, we need two things: intelligence and an artifact. The
computer has been the artifact of choice.
A1 also owes a debt to the software side of computer science, which has supplied the
operating systems, programming languages, and tools needed to write modern programs

Control theory and Cybernetics (1948-present)

Ktesibios of Alexandria (c. 250 B.c.) built the first self-controlling machine: a water clock
with a regulator that kept the flow of water running through it at a constant, predictable pace.
Modern control theory, especially the branch known as stochastic optimal control, has
as its goal the design of systems that maximize an objective function over time.

Linguistics (1957-present)
Modem linguistics and AI, then, were "born" at about the same time, and grew up
together, intersecting in a hybrid field called computational linguistics or natural language
processing.

1.1.3 The History of Artificial Intelligence

The gestation of artificial intelligence (1943-1955)
There were a number of early examples of work that can be characterized as AI, but it
was Alan Turing who first articulated a complete vision of A1 in his 1950 article "Comput-
ing Machinery and Intelligence." Therein, he introduced the Turing test, machine learning,
genetic algorithms, and reinforcement learning.

The birth of artificial intelligence (1956)

McCarthy convinced Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester to help him
bring together U.S. researchers interested in automata theory, neural nets, and the study of
intelligence. They organized a two-month workshop at Dartmouth in the summer of 1956.
Perhaps the longest-lasting thing to come out of the workshop was an agreement to adopt McCarthy's
new name for the field: artificial intelligence.

Early enthusiasm, great expectations (1952-1969)

The early years of A1 were full of successes-in a limited way.
General Problem Solver (GPS) was a computer program created in 1957 by Herbert Simon and
Allen Newell to build a universal problem solver machine. The order in which the program considered
subgoals and possible actions was similar to that in which humans approached the same problems. Thus,
GPS was probably the first program to embody the "thinking humanly" approach.
At IBM, Nathaniel Rochester and his colleagues produced some of the first A1 pro-
grams. Herbert Gelernter (1959) constructed the Geometry Theorem Prover, which was
able to prove theorems that many students of mathematics would find quite tricky.
Lisp was invented by John McCarthy in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT). In 1963, McCarthy started the AI lab at Stanford.
Tom Evans's ANALOGY program (1968) solved geometric analogy problems that appear in IQ tests, such as
the one in Figure 1.1

Figure 1.1 The Tom Evan’s ANALOGY program could solve geometric analogy problems as
shown.

A dose of reality (1966-1973)

From the beginning, AI researchers were not shy about making predictions of their coming
successes. The following statement by Herbert Simon in 1957 is often quoted:
“It is not my aim to surprise or shock you-but the simplest way I can summarize is to say
that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover,
their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until-in a visible future-the
range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human
mind has been applied.
Knowledge-based systems: The key to power? (1969-1979)
Dendral was an influential pioneer project in artificial intelligence (AI) of the 1960s, and the
computer software expert system that it produced. Its primary aim was to help organic chemists in
identifying unknown organic molecules, by analyzing their mass spectra and using knowledge of
chemistry. It was done at Stanford University by Edward Feigenbaum, Bruce Buchanan, Joshua
Lederberg, and Carl Djerassi.

A1 becomes an industry (1980-present)

In 1981, the Japanese announced the "Fifth Generation" project, a 10-year plan to build
intelligent computers running Prolog. Overall, the A1 industry boomed from a few million dollars in 1980 to
billions of dollars in 1988.
The return of neural networks (1986-present)
Psychologists including David Rumelhart and Geoff Hinton continued the study of neural-net models of
memory.
A1 becomes a science (1987-present)
In recent years, approaches based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) have come to dominate the area.
Speech technology and the related field of handwritten character recognition are already making the
transition to widespread industrial and consumer applications.
The Bayesian network formalism was invented to allow efficient representation of, and rigorous reasoning
with, uncertain knowledge.
The emergence of intelligent agents (1995-present)
One of the most important environments for intelligent agents is the Internet.

1.1.4 The state of art

What can A1 do today?
Autonomous planning and scheduling: A hundred million miles from Earth, NASA's
Remote Agent program became the first on-board autonomous planning program to control
the scheduling of operations for a spacecraft (Jonsson et al., 2000). Remote Agent generated
plans from high-level goals specified from the ground, and it monitored the operation of the
spacecraft as the plans were executed-detecting, diagnosing, and recovering from problems
as they occurred.
Game playing: IBM's Deep Blue became the first computer program to defeat the
world champion in a chess match when it bested Garry Kasparov by a score of 3.5 to 2.5 in
an exhibition match (Goodman and Keene, 1997).
Autonomous control: The ALVINN computer vision system was trained to steer a car
to keep it following a lane. It was placed in CMU's NAVLAB computer-controlled minivan
and used to navigate across the United States-for 2850 miles it was in control of steering the
vehicle 98% of the time.
Diagnosis: Medical diagnosis programs based on probabilistic analysis have been able
to perform at the level of an expert physician in several areas of medicine.
Logistics Planning: During the Persian Gulf crisis of 1991, U.S. forces deployed a
Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool, DART (Cross and Walker, 1994), to do automated
logistics planning and scheduling for transportation. This involved up to 50,000 vehicles,
cargo, and people at a time, and had to account for starting points, destinations, routes, and
conflict resolution among all parameters. The AI planning techniques allowed a plan to be
generated in hours that would have taken weeks with older methods. The Defense Advanced
Research Project Agency (DARPA) stated that this single application more than paid back
DARPA's 30-year investment in AI.
Robotics: Many surgeons now use robot assistants in microsurgery. HipNav (DiGioia
et al., 1996) is a system that uses computer vision techniques to create a three-dimensional
model of a patient's internal anatomy and then uses robotic control to guide the insertion of a
hip replacement prosthesis.
Language understanding and problem solving: PROVERB (Littman et al., 1999) is a
computer program that solves crossword puzzles better than most humans, using constraints
on possible word fillers, a large database of past puzzles, and a variety of information sources
including dictionaries and online databases such as a list of movies and the actors that appear
in them.

1.2 INTELLIGENT AGENTS

1.2.1 Agents and environments

An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and
SENSOR acting upon that environment through actuators. This simple idea is illustrated in Figure 1.2.

o A human agent has eyes, ears, and other organs for sensors and hands, legs, mouth, and other body
parts for actuators.
o A robotic agent might have cameras and infrared range finders for sensors and various motors for
actuators.
o 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.

Figure 1.2 Agents interact with environments through sensors and actuators.

Percept
We use the term percept to refer to the agent's perceptual inputs at any given instant.
Percept Sequence
An agent's percept sequence is the complete history of everything the agent has ever perceived.
Agent function
Mathematically speaking, we say that an agent's behavior is described by the agent function
that maps any given percept sequence to an action.

Agent program
Internally, The agent function for an artificial agent will be implemented by an agent program. It is
important to keep these two ideas distinct. The agent function is an abstract mathematical
description; the agent program is a concrete implementation, running on the agent architecture.

To illustrate these ideas, we will use a very simple example-the vacuum-cleaner world
shown in Figure 1.3. This particular world has just two locations: squares A and B. The vacuum
agent perceives which square it is in and whether there is dirt in the square. It can choose to move
left, move right, suck up the dirt, or do nothing. One very simple agent function is the following: if
the current square is dirty, then suck, otherwise move to the other square. A partial tabulation of this
agent function is shown in Figure 1.4.
Figure 1.3 A vacuum-cleaner world with just two
locations.

Agent function

Percept Sequence Action

[A, Clean] Right
[A, Dirty] Suck
[B, Clean] Left
[B, Dirty] Suck
[A, Clean], [A, Clean] Right
[A, Clean], [A, Dirty] Suck
…
Figure 1.4 Partial tabulation of a
simple agent function for the
vacuum-cleaner world shown in
Figure 1.3.

Rational Agent
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. The right action is the one that will cause the agent to be
most successful.
Performance measures
A performance measure embodies the criterion for success of an agent's behavior. When
an agent is plunked down in an environment, it generates a sequence of actions according
to the percepts it receives. 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:
 o The performance measure that defines the criterion of success.
o The agent's prior knowledge of the environment.
o The actions that the agent can perform.
o 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 ex-
pected to maximize its performance measure, given the evidence provided by the percept
sequence and whatever built-in knowledge the agent has.

Omniscience, learning, and autonomy

An omniscient agent knows the actual outcome of its actions and can act accordingly; but
omniscience is impossible in reality.
Doing actions in order to modify future percepts-sometimes called information gathering-is
an important part of rationality.
Our definition requires a rational agent not only to gather information, but also to learn
as much as possible from what it perceives.
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.

Task environments
We must think about task environments, which are essentially the "problems" to which rational agents are
the "solutions."
Specifying the task environment
The rationality of the simple vacuum-cleaner agent, needs specification of
o the performance measure
o the environment
o the agent's actuators and sensors.

PEAS
All these are grouped together under the heading of the task environment.
We call this 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.
Agent Type Performance Environments Actuators Sensors
Measure
Taxi driver Safe: fast, legal, Roads,other Steering,accelerator, Cameras,sonar,
comfortable trip, traffic,pedestrians, brake, Speedometer,GPS,
maximize profits customers Signal,horn,display Odometer,engine
sensors,keyboards,
accelerometer
Figure 1.5 PEAS description of the task environment for an automated taxi.
 Figure 1.6 Examples of agent types and their PEAS descriptions.

Properties of task environments

o Fully observable vs. partially observable

o Deterministic vs. stochastic
o Episodic vs. sequential
o Static vs. dynamic
o Discrete vs. continuous
o Single agent vs. multiagent
Fully observable vs. partially observable.
If an agent's sensors give it access to the complete state of the environment at each
point in time, then we say that the task environment is fully observable. A task envi-
ronment is effectively fully observable if the sensors detect all aspects that are relevant
to the choice of action;
An environment might be partially observable because of noisy and inaccurate sensors or because
parts of the state are simplly missing from the sensor data.
Deterministic vs. stochastic.
If the next state of the environment is completely determined by the current state and
the action executed by the agent, then we say the environment is deterministic; other-
wise, it is stochastic.
Episodic vs. 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. Cru-
cially, the next episode does not depend on the actions taken in previous episodes.
For example, an agent that has to spot defective parts on an assembly line bases each decision on
the current part, regardless of previous decisions;
In sequential environments, on the other hand, the current decision
could affect all future decisions. Chess and taxi driving are sequential:
Discrete vs. 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. For example, a
discrete-state environment such as a chess game has a finite number of distinct states.
Chess also has a discrete set of percepts and actions. Taxi driving is a continuous-
state and continuous-time problem: the speed and location of the taxi and of the other
vehicles sweep through a range of continuous values and do so smoothly over time.
Taxi-driving actions are also continuous (steering angles, etc.).

Single agent vs. multiagent.

An agent solving a crossword puzzle by itself is clearly in a
single-agent environment, whereas an agent playing chess is in a two-agent environ-
ment.
As one might expect, the hardest case is partially observable, stochastic, sequential, dynamic,
continuous, and multiagent.

Figure 1.7 lists the properties of a number of familiar environments.

Figure 1.7 Examples of task environments and their characteristics.

Agent programs
The agent programs all have the same skeleton: they take the current percept as input from the
sensors and return an action to the actuatom6 Notice the difference between the agent program,
which takes the current percept as input, and the agent function, which takes the entire percept
history. The agent program takes just the current percept as input because nothing more is available
from the environment; if the agent's actions depend on the entire percept sequence, the agent will
have to remember the percepts.

Function TABLE-DRIVEN_AGENT(percept) returns an action

static: percepts, a sequence initially empty

table, a table of actions, indexed by percept sequence
 append percept to the end of percepts
action  LOOKUP(percepts, table)
return action

Figure 1.8 The TABLE-DRIVEN-AGENT program is invoked for each new percept and
returns an action each time.

Drawbacks:
• Table lookup of percept-action pairs defining all possible condition-action rules necessary
to interact in an environment
• Problems
– Too big to generate and to store (Chess has about 10^120 states, for example)
– No knowledge of non-perceptual parts of the current state
– Not adaptive to changes in the environment; requires entire table to be updated if
changes occur
– Looping: Can't make actions conditional

• Take a long time to build the table

• No autonomy
• Even with learning, need a long time to learn the table entries

Some Agent Types

• Table-driven agents
– use a percept sequence/action table in memory to find the next action. They are
implemented by a (large) lookup table.
• Simple reflex agents
– are based on condition-action rules, implemented with an appropriate production
system. They are stateless devices which do not have memory of past world states.
• Agents with memory
– have internal state, which is used to keep track of past states of the world.
• Agents with goals
– are agents that, in addition to state information, have goal information that describes
desirable situations. Agents of this kind take future events into consideration.
• Utility-based agents
– base their decisions on classic axiomatic utility theory in order to act rationally.

Simple Reflex Agent

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 whose agent function
is tabulated in Figure 1.10 is a simple reflex agent, because its decision is based only on the current location
and on whether that contains dirt.
o Select action on the basis of only the current percept.
E.g. the vacuum-agent
o Large reduction in possible percept/action situations(next page).
o Implemented through condition-action rules
If dirty then suck
A Simple Reflex Agent: Schema

Figure 1.9 Schematic diagram of a simple reflex agent.

function SIMPLE-REFLEX-AGENT(percept) returns an action

static: rules, a set of condition-action rules

state  INTERPRET-INPUT(percept)
rule  RULE-MATCH(state, rule)
action  RULE-ACTION[rule]
return action

Figure 1.10 A simple reflex agent. It acts according to a rule whose condition matches
the current state, as defined by the percept.

function REFLEX-VACUUM-AGENT ([location, status]) return an action

if status == Dirty then return Suck
else if location == A then return Right
else if location == B then return Left

Figure 1.11 The agent program for a simple reflex agent in the two-state vacuum environment. This
program implements the agent function tabulated in the figure 1.4.

 Characteristics
o Only works if the environment is fully observable.
o Lacking history, easily get stuck in infinite loops
o One solution is to randomize actions
o
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 and thereby reflects at least some of the unobserved aspects of the current
state.
Updating this internal state information as time goes by requires two kinds of knowledge to be
encoded in the agent program. First, we need some information about how the world evolves
independently of the agent-for example, that an overtaking car generally will be closer behind than
it was a moment ago. Second, we need some information about how the agent's own actions affect
the world-for example, that when the agent turns the steering wheel clockwise, the car turns to the
right or that after driving for five minutes northbound on the freeway one is usually about five miles
north of where one was five minutes ago. This knowledge about "how the world working - whether
implemented in simple Boolean circuits or in complete scientific theories-is called a model of the
world. An agent that uses such a MODEL-BASED model is called a model-based agent.

Figure 1.12 A model based reflex agent

function REFLEX-AGENT-WITH-STATE(percept) returns an action

static: rules, a set of condition-action rules
state, a description of the current world state
action, the most recent action.
state  UPDATE-STATE(state, action, percept)
rule  RULE-MATCH(state, rule)
action  RULE-ACTION[rule]
return action

Figure 1.13 Model based reflex agent. It keeps track of the current state of the world using an internal
model. It then chooses an action in the same way as the reflex agent.

Goal-based 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. In other words, as well as a current state description, the agent needs some sort of goal
information that describes situations that are desirable-for example, being at the passenger's destination. The agent
program can combine this with information about the results of possible actions (the same information as
was used to update internal state in the reflex agent) in order to choose actions that achieve the goal. Figure
1.13 shows the goal-based agent's structure.
Figure 1.14 A goal based agent

Utility-based 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 others. Goals just provide a
crude binary distinction between "happy" and "unhappy" states, whereas a more general
performance measure should allow a comparison of different world states according to exactly
how happy they would make the agent if they could be achieved. Because "happy" does not sound
very scientific, the customary terminology is to say that if one world state is preferred to another,
then it has higher utility for the agent.

Figure 1.15 A model-based, utility-based agent. It uses a model of the world, along with
a utility function that measures its preferences among states of the world. Then it chooses the
action that leads to the best expected utility, where expected utility is computed by averaging
over all possible outcome states, weighted by the probability of the outcome.
 • Certain goals can be reached in different ways.
– Some are better, have a higher utility.
• Utility function maps a (sequence of) state(s) onto a real number.
• Improves on goals:
– Selecting between conflicting goals
– Select appropriately between several goals based on likelihood of success.

Figure 1.16 A general model of learning agents.

• All agents can improve their performance through learning.

A learning agent can be divided into four conceptual components, as shown in Figure 1.15
The most important distinction is between the learning element, which is responsible for making
improvements, and the performance element, which is responsible for selecting external actions.
The performance element is what we have previously considered to be the entire agent: it takes in
percepts and decides on actions. 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.
The last component of the learning agent is the problem generator. It is responsible
for suggesting actions that will lead to new and informative experiences. But if the agent is willing
to explore a little, it might discover much better actions for the long run. The problem
generator's job is to suggest these exploratory actions. This is what scientists do when they
carry out experiments.

Summary: Intelligent Agents

• An agent perceives and acts in an environment, has an architecture, and is implemented by
an agent program.
• Task environment – PEAS (Performance, Environment, Actuators, Sensors)
• The most challenging environments are inaccessible, nondeterministic, dynamic, and
continuous.
• An ideal agent always chooses the action which maximizes its expected performance, given
its percept sequence so far.
• An agent program maps from percept to action and updates internal state.
 – Reflex agents respond immediately to percepts.
• simple reflex agents
• model-based reflex agents
– Goal-based agents act in order to achieve their goal(s).
– Utility-based agents maximize their own utility function.
• All agents can improve their performance through learning.