Artificial
Intelligence

2.1 Agents

An agent is something that acts in an environment. An agent can, for example, be a person, a robot, a dog, a worm, the wind, gravity, a lamp, or a computer program that buys and sells.

Purposive agents have preferences. They prefer some states of the world to other states, and they act to try to achieve the states they prefer most. The non-purposive agents are grouped together and called nature. Whether or not an agent is purposive is a modeling assumption that may, or may not, be appropriate. For example, for some applications it may be appropriate to model a dog as purposive, and for others it may suffice to model a dog as non-purposive.

If an agent does not have preferences, by definition it does not care what world state it ends up in, and so it does not matter what it does. The only reason to design an agent is to instill it with preferences - to make it prefer some world states and try to achieve them. An agent does not have to know its preferences. For example, a thermostat is an agent that senses the world and turns a heater either on or off. There are preferences embedded in the thermostat, such as to keep the occupants of a room at a pleasant temperature, even though the thermostat arguably does not know these are its preferences. The preferences of an agent are often the preferences of the designer of the agent, but sometimes an agent can be given goals and preferences at run time.

Agents interact with the environment with a body. An embodied agent has a physical body. A robot is an artificial purposive embodied agent. Sometimes agents that act only in an information space are called robots, but we just refer to those as agents.

This chapter considers how to build purposive agents. We use robots as a main motivating example, because much of the work has been carried out in the context of robotics and much of the terminology is from robotics. However, the discussion is intended to cover all agents.

Agents receive information through their sensors. An agent's actions depend on the information it receives from its sensors. These sensors may, or may not, reflect what is true in the world. Sensors can be noisy, unreliable, or broken, and even when sensors are reliable there is still ambiguity about the world based on sensor readings. An agent must act on the information it has available. Often this information is very weak, for example, "sensor s appears to be producing value v."

Agents act in the world through their actuators (also called effectors). Actuators can also be noisy, unreliable, slow, or broken. What an agent controls is the message (command) it sends to its actuators. Agents often carry out actions to find more information about the world, such as opening a cupboard door to find out what is in the cupboard or giving students a test to determine their knowledge.