ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

CSE 3201

Intelligent Agents

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 Outline
• Agents and Environments
• Rationality
• PEAS (Performance measure, Environment, Actuators, Sensors)
• Environment types
• Agent types

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Agents

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Agents

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Agents

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 Intelligent Agents
Four main aspects that need to be taken into consideration when designing an intelligent
agent.
■ Percepts: This is the information that the agent receives
■ Actions: This is what the agent needs to do or can do to achieve its objectives.
■ Goals: This is the factor that the agent is trying to achieve
■ Environment: The final aspect is the environment in which the agent will be working in. The
environment in which the agent performs is probably the most important aspect that
needs to be considered as this affects the outcome of the percepts, actions and goals.

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Agents and Environment

Environment -> sensors -> agent

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Vacuum-Cleaner World

(Act on a single perception)

(Act on a sequence of perception)

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Rational Agent

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Rational Agent

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Vacuum Cleaner Agent

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Specifying the task environment (PEAS)

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PEAS for an automated taxi driver

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PEAS for a medical diagnosis system

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PEAS for Interactive English tutor

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PEAS for Mushroom-Picking Robot

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 Omniscience
■ Usually when we think of omniscience, we're thinking of an attribute of God. But in
artificial intelligence, omniscience has a different definition.
■ An omniscient agent knows the actual effects of its actions.
■ In other words, any AI program that knows the exactly what will happen for all its
possible actions is omniscient. By this definition, a good Tic-Tac-Toe AI is omniscient
because it always knows the outcome.
■ Rationality is not the same as perfection. Rationality maximizes Expected performance ,
while perfection maximizes Actual performance.

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Environment types

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 Environment types
Fully vs Partially Observable (Cont…)
■ Consider the example of Chess where each player has access to the complete board
information. Every decision is made considering the state of the board at that time
and the possible moves by the other player. This is a ‘fully observable’ environment.
■ Contrast this with Poker where players cannot anticipate the opponent’s game as
they do not have access to the opponent’s cards. Such an environment is ‘Partially
Observable’.

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 Environment types
Deterministic vs Stochastic
■ In a Deterministic environment, the outcome is certain and can be determined based on
a specific state. However, in a Stochastic environment, the next state cannot be predicted
with certainty. Chess can be considered as having a Deterministic environment. The
autonomous vehicle, however, has a Stochastic environment. Here, the decision taken by
the autonomous vehicle is based on the probability of action of other vehicles.
■ In a deterministic environment, any action that is taken uniquely determines its outcome.
In chess, for example, moving a pawn from A2 to A3 will always work. There is no
uncertainty.
■ In a stochastic environment, there is always some level of randomness. Any games that
involve dice are good examples - you can never be certain that a specific number will be
rolled.

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 Environment Types
Episodic vs Sequential
■ An episode = Agent’s single pair of perception & action.
■ The quality of the agent’s action doesn’t depend on other episodes. That is, the next
episode does not depend on the actions taken in previous episodes.
■ Episodic environment is simpler, the agent doesn’t need to think ahead.
■ In case of sequential, current action may affect all future decisions.
- Exp: Taxi Driver and Chess.

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 Environment Types
Static vs Dynamic
■ A dynamic environment always changes over time.
■ A Dynamic environment might change while the agent is processing a response.
However, in a Static environment, the environment does not change during the
course of decision making.
- Ex: the number of people always changes in a street.
■ In Chess, the environment remains unchanged (Static) during the period a player is
attempting for the next move.

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 Environment types

*See book Russel and Norvig (3rd Edition): figure 2.6 23

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Simple reflex agents

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Simple reflex agents

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 Simple reflex agents
■ Have no Memory.
■ Simple-reflex agents are simple, but they turn out to be of very limited intelligence.
■ The agent will work only if the correct decision can be made on the basis of the
current percept – that is only if the environment is fully observable.

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Model-based reflex agents

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Model-based reflex agents

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Model-based reflex agents

Information about how the world evolves independently of the

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 Goal-based agents
■ Goal-based agents: Goal information needed to make decision.
■ The agent program can combine this with information about the results of possible
actions in order to choose actions that achieve the goal
■ Involves consideration of the future, "what will happen if I do...?"
■ Usually requires search and planning
■ Knowing something about the current state of the environment is not always enough
to decide what to do. In this situation goal will help you to take decision.

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Goal-based agents

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Goal-based agents

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Utility-based agents

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Utility-based agents

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 Goal-based vs Utility-based agent
■ Well Goal Based agents will use information about what they know and their current
state to see if they have accomplished what they wanted to or not however that
alone is not enough, you also need a utility based agent to the performance of
accomplishing the goal.
■ For example, if you have an autonomous car that you want to take you somewhere,
once it gets to a stop and it has the ability to turn in 3 different directions, using the
goal-based agent it can know which one it should take to get to it’s destination.
Using the utility-based agent it can measure which direction might be better to get
to the destination. Maybe one is faster but dangerous and the other is slower but
safer.

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