The main points you should have learned from this chapter are as follows:

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  An agent system is composed of an agent and an environment.

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  Agents have sensors and actuators to interact with the environment.

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  An agent is composed of a body and interacting controllers.

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  Agents are situated in time and must make decisions on what to do based on their history of interaction with the environment.

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  An agent has direct access to what it has remembered (its belief state) and what it has just observed. At each point in time, an agent decides what to do and what to remember based on its belief state and its current observations.

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  Complex agents are built modularly in terms of interacting hierarchical layers.

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  An intelligent agent requires knowledge that is acquired at design time, offline or online.

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  An agent’s decisions implicitly convey the preferences of the agent. It is debatable whether it should be up to the owners or designers of agents (such as autonomous vehicles) to set the preferences, as they have different preferences than the rest of the population.