Rational agents
• Rationality
– Performance measuring success
– Agents prior knowledge of environment
– Actions that agent can perform
– Agent’s percept sequence to date
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.
•
Artificial Intelligence a modern approach 1
Rationality
• Rational is different from omniscience(knows
everything)
• Percepts may not supply all relevant information
• E.g., in card game, don’t know cards of others.
• Rational is different from being perfect
• Rationality maximizes expected outcome(vicinity of
goal) while perfection maximizes actual outcome.
Artificial Intelligence a modern approach 2
Autonomy in Agents
The autonomy of an agent is the extent to which its
behaviour is determined by its own experience,
rather than knowledge of designer.
• Extremes
• No autonomy – ignores environment/data
• Complete autonomy – must act randomly/no program
• Example: baby learning to crawl
• Ideal: design agents to have some autonomy
• Possibly become more autonomous with experience
PEAS
• PEAS: Performance measure, Environment,
Actuators, Sensors
• Must first specify the setting for intelligent
agent design
• Consider, e.g., the task of designing an
automated taxi driver:
– Performance measure: Safe, fast, legal, comfortable trip,
maximize profits
– Environment: Roads, other traffic, pedestrians, customers
– Actuators: Steering wheel, accelerator, brake, signal, horn
– Sensors: Cameras, sonar, speedometer, GPS, odometer,
engine sensors, keyboard
Artificial Intelligence a modern approach 4
PEAS
• Agent: Part-picking robot
• Performance measure: Percentage of parts in
correct bins
• Environment: Conveyor belt with parts, bins
• Actuators: Jointed arm and hand
• Sensors: Camera, joint angle sensors
Artificial Intelligence a modern approach 5
PEAS
• Agent: Interactive English tutor
• Performance measure: Maximize student's
score on test
• Environment: Set of students
• Actuators: Screen display (exercises,
suggestions, corrections)
• Sensors: Keyboard
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