AI Agents - Basic Concepts and their types

CHAPTER 2
Oliver Schulte
Summer2011
Intelligent Agents

Outline
Artificial Intelligence a modern approach
2
 Agents and environments
 Rationality
 PEAS (Performance measure, Environment,
Actuators, Sensors)
 Environment types
 Agent types

Agents
3
• An agent is anything that can be viewed as
perceiving its environment through sensors and
acting upon that environment through actuators
• Human agent:
– eyes, ears, and other organs for sensors;
– hands, legs, mouth, and other body parts for actuators
• Robotic agent:
– cameras and infrared range finders for sensors
– various motors for actuators

Agents and environments
4
• The agent function maps from percept histories to
actions:
[f: P*  A]
• The agent program runs on the physical architecture to
produce f
• agent = architecture + program
•

Vacuum-cleaner world
5
 Percepts: location and contents, e.g., [A,Dirty]
 Actions: Left, Right, Suck, NoOp
 Agent’s function  look-up table
 For many agents this is a very large table
Demo:
http://www.ai.sri.com/~oreilly/aima3ejava/aima3ejavademos.
html

Rational agents
6
• 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.


Examples of Rational Choice
 See File: intro-choice.doc
7

Rationality
8
 Rational is different from omniscience
 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 while perfection
maximizes actual outcome.

Autonomy in Agents
 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
The autonomy of an agent is the extent to which its
behaviour is determined by its own experience,
rather than knowledge of designer.

PEAS
10
• 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

PEAS
11
 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

PEAS
12
 Agent: Interactive English tutor
 Performance measure: Maximize student's score on
test
 Environment: Set of students
 Actuators: Screen display (exercises, suggestions,
corrections)
 Sensors: Keyboard

Environment types
13
• Fully observable (vs. partially observable)
• Deterministic (vs. stochastic)
• Episodic (vs. sequential)
• Static (vs. dynamic)
• Discrete (vs. continuous)
• Single agent (vs. multiagent):

Fully observable (vs. partially observable)
14
 Is everything an agent requires to choose its actions
available to it via its sensors? Perfect or Full
information.
 If so, the environment is fully accessible
 If not, parts of the environment are inaccessible
 Agent must make informed guesses about world.
 In decision theory: perfect information vs. imperfect
information.
Cross Word Backgammon Taxi driver Part picking robot
Poker Image analysis
Fully Fully Fully
Partially
Partially Partially

Deterministic (vs. stochastic)
15
 Does the change in world state
 Depend only on current state and agent’s action?
 Non-deterministic environments
 Have aspects beyond the control of the agent
 Utility functions have to guess at changes in world
Cross Word Backgammon Taxi driver Part
Deterministic Deterministic
Stochastic
Stochastic
Stochastic Stochastic

Episodic (vs. sequential):
16
 Is the choice of current action
 Dependent on previous actions?
 If not, then the environment is episodic
 In non-episodic environments:
 Agent has to plan ahead:
 Current choice will affect future actions
Sequential
Sequential
Sequential
Sequential Episodic Episodic

Static (vs. dynamic):
17
 Static environments don’t change
 While the agent is deliberating over what to do
 Dynamic environments do change
 So agent should/could consult the world when choosing actions
 Alternatively: anticipate the change during deliberation OR make
decision very fast
 Semidynamic: If the environment itself does not change
with the passage of time but the agent's performance
score does.
Static Static Static Dynamic Dynamic Semi
Another example: off-line route planning vs. on-board navigation system

Discrete (vs. continuous)
18
 A limited number of distinct, clearly defined percepts and
actions vs. a range of values (continuous)
Discrete Discrete Discrete Conti Conti Conti

Single agent (vs. multiagent):
19
 An agent operating by itself in an environment or there are
many agents working together
Single Single Single
Multi
Multi
Multi

Observable Deterministic Static
Episodic Agents
Discrete
Cross Word
Backgammon
Taxi driver
Part picking robot
Poker
Image analysis
Deterministic
Stochastic
Deterministic
Stochastic
Stochastic
Stochastic
Sequential
Sequential
Sequential
Sequential
Episodic
Episodic
Static
Static
Static
Dynamic
Dynamic
Semi
Discrete
Discrete
Discrete
Conti
Conti
Conti
Single
Single
Single
Multi
Multi
Multi
Summary.
Fully
Fully
Fully
Partially
Partially
Partially

Choice under (Un)certainty
21
Fully
Observable
Deterministic
Certainty:
Search
Uncertainty
no
yes
yes
no

Agent types
22
 Four basic types in order of increasing generality:
 Simple reflex agents
 Reflex agents with state/model
 Goal-based agents
 Utility-based agents
 All these can be turned into learning agents
 http://www.ai.sri.com/~oreilly/aima3ejava/aima3ejavad
emos.html

Simple reflex agents
23

Simple reflex agents
24
 Simple but very limited intelligence.
 Action does not depend on percept history, only on current
percept.
 Therefore no memory requirements.
 Infinite loops
 Suppose vacuum cleaner does not observe location. What do you do
given location = clean? Left of A or right on B -> infinite loop.
 Fly buzzing around window or light.
 Possible Solution: Randomize action.
 Thermostat.
 Chess – openings, endings
 Lookup table (not a good idea in general)
 35100
entries required for the entire game

States: Beyond Reflexes
• Recall the agent function that maps from percept histories
to actions:
[f: P*  A]
 An agent program can implement an agent function by
maintaining an internal state.
 The internal state can contain information about the state
of the external environment.
 The state depends on the history of percepts and on the
history of actions taken:
[f: P*, A* S A] where S is the set of states.
 If each internal state includes all information relevant to
information making, the state space is Markovian.
25

States and Memory: Game Theory
 If each state includes the information about the
percepts and actions that led to it, the state space has
perfect recall.
 Perfect Information = Perfect Recall + Full
Observability + Deterministic Actions.
26

Model-based reflex agents
27
 Know how world evolves
 Overtaking car gets closer from
behind
 How agents actions affect the
world
 Wheel turned clockwise takes you
right
 Model base agents update their
state

Goal-based agents
28
• knowing state and environment? Enough?
– Taxi can go left, right, straight
• Have a goal
 A destination to get to
 Uses knowledge about a goal to guide its actions
 E.g., Search, planning

Goal-based agents
29
• Reflex agent breaks when it sees brake lights. Goal based agent
reasons
– Brake light -> car in front is stopping -> I should stop -> I should use brake

Utility-based agents
30
 Goals are not always enough
 Many action sequences get taxi to destination
 Consider other things. How fast, how safe…..
 A utility function maps a state onto a real number
which describes the associated degree of
“happiness”, “goodness”, “success”.
 Where does the utility measure come from?
 Economics: money.
 Biology: number of offspring.
 Your life?

Utility-based agents
31

Learning agents
32
 Performance element is
what was previously the
whole agent
 Input sensor
 Output action
 Learning element
 Modifies performance
element.

Learning agents
33
 Critic: how the agent is
doing
 Input: checkmate?
 Fixed
 Problem generator
 Tries to solve the problem
differently instead of
optimizing.
 Suggests exploring new
actions -> new problems.

Learning agents(Taxi driver)
 Performance element
 How it currently drives
 Taxi driver Makes quick left turn across 3 lanes
 Critics observe shocking language by passenger and other drivers
and informs bad action
 Learning element tries to modify performance elements for future
 Problem generator suggests experiment out something called
Brakes on different Road conditions
 Exploration vs. Exploitation
 Learning experience can be costly in the short run
 shocking language from other drivers
 Less tip
 Fewer passengers
34

The Big Picture: AI for Model-Based Agents
35
Action
Learning
Knowledge
Logic
Probability
Heuristics
Inference
Planning
Decision Theory
Game Theory
Reinforcement
Learning
Machine Learning
Statistics

The Picture for Reflex-Based Agents
36
Action
Learning
Reinforcement
Learning
• Studied in AI, Cybernetics, Control Theory, Biology,
Psychology.

Discussion Question
 Model-based behaviour has a large overhead.
 Our large brains are very expensive from an
evolutionary point of view.
 Why would it be worthwhile to base behaviour on a
model rather than “hard-code” it?
 For what types of organisms in what type of
environments?
37

Summary
 Agents can be described by their PEAS.
 Environments can be described by several key properties:
64 Environment Types.
 A rational agent maximizes the performance measure for
their PEAS.
 The performance measure depends on the agent function.
 The agent program implements the agent function.
 3 main architectures for agent programs.
 In this course we will look at some of the common and
useful combinations of environment/agent architecture.
38

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