CST401: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

MODULE 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction, What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

1.2 The foundations of AI, The history of AI

1.3 Applications of AI

1.4 Intelligent Agents – Agents and Environments

1.5 Good behavior: The concept of rationality

1.6 The nature of Environments

1.7 The structure of Agents

1.1 Introduction - What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Artificial intelligence is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building

smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.

Artificial intelligence allows machines to replicate the capabilities of the human mind.

From the development of self-driving cars to the development of smart assistants like Siri and
Alexa, AI is a growing part of everyday life.

We can describe AI as the four shown in figure below

The definitions on top are concerned with thought processes and reasoning, whereas the ones on
the bottom address behavior.

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The definitions on the left measure success in terms of fidelity to human performance, whereas
the ones on the right, measure against an ideal performance measure, which is called as
rationality.

A system is rational if it does the “right thing,” given what it knows.

Acting humanly: The Turing Test approach

The Turing Test is proposed by Alan Turing (1950)It was designed to provide a satisfactory
operational definition of intelligence. Judge communicates with a human and machine over text
through a channel. Both human and a machine try to act like a human.Judge tries to tell which is
which.

A computer passes the test if a human interrogator, after posing some written questions, cannot
tell whether the written responses come from a person or from a computer.

The computer would need to possess the following capabilities:

 Natural Language Processing - To enable it to communicate successfully in English

 Knowledge Representation - to store what it knows or hears
 Automated Reasoning - to use the stored information to answer questions and to draw
new conclusions
 Machine Learning - to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate patterns.

Turing’s test deliberately avoided direct physical interaction between the interrogator and the
computer.

The total Turing Test includes a video signal so that the interrogator can test the subject’s
perceptual abilities, as well as the opportunity for the interrogator to pass physical objects
“through the hatch.”

To pass the total Turing Test, the computer will need

 computer vision to perceive objects, and

 robotics to manipulate objects and move about.

These six disciplines compose most of AI.

Thinking humanly: The cognitive modeling approach

If we are going to say that a given program thinks like a human, we must have some way of
determining how humans think.

We need to get inside the actual workings of human minds.

There are three ways to do this:

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 Introspection—trying to catch our own thoughts as they go by.

 Psychological experiments—observing a person in action; and
 Brain imaging—observing the brain in action

Once we have a sufficiently precise theory of the mind, it becomes possible to express the theory
as a computer program.

If the program’s input–output behavior matches corresponding human behavior, that is evidence
that some of the program’s mechanisms could also be operating in humans.

The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science brings together computer models from AI and
experimental techniques from psychology to construct precise and testable theories of the human
mind.

Thinking rationally: The “laws of thought” approach

This can be done in two ways

SYLLOGISM: an instance of a form of reasoning in which a conclusion is drawn from two

given or assumed propositions, “Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore, Socrates is
mortal.”

LOGIC: study of laws of thought to govern the operation of the mind not easy to take informal
knowledge and state it in the formal terms required by logical notation.

There are two main obstacles to this approach.

First, it is not easy to take informal knowledge and state it in the formal terms required by logical
notation, particularly when the knowledge is less than 100% certain.

Second, there is a big difference between solving a problem “in principle” and solving it in
practice.

Acting rationally: The rational agent approach

An agent is just something that acts

A computer agent is expected to have other attributes distinguish them from mere programs.
They are:

 Operate autonomously
 Perceive their environment
 Persist over a prolonged time period
 Adapt to change, and
 Create and pursue goals

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1.2 The Foundations of AI

The Foundations of AI gives a brief history of the disciplines that contributed ideas, viewpoints,
and techniques to AI. They are

Different people think of AI differently.

Two important questions to ask are: Are you concerned with thinking or behavior?

Do you want to model humans or work from an ideal standard?

Intelligence is concerned mainly with rational action. Ideally, an intelligent agent takes the best
possible action in a situation.

We will study the problem of building agents that are intelligent in this sense.

Philosophers (going back to 400 B.c.) made AI conceivable by considering the ideas that the
mind is in some ways like a machine, that it operates on knowledge encoded in some internal
language, and that thought can be used to choose what actions to take.

Mathematicians provided the tools to manipulate statements of logical certainty as well as

uncertain, probabilistic statements. They also set the groundwork for understanding computation
and reasoning about algorithms.

Economists formalized the problem of making decisions that maximize the expected outcome to
the decision-maker.

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Psychologists adopted the idea that humans and animals can be considered information
processing machines.

Linguists showed that language use fits into this model.

Computer engineers provided the artifacts that make AI applications possible.

AI programs tend to be large, and they could not work without the great advances in speed and
memory that the computer industry has provided.

Control theory deals with designing devices that act optimally on the basis of feedback from the
environment. Initially, the mathematical tools of control theory were quite different from AI, but
the fields are coming closer together.

Philosophy

• Can formal rules be used to draw valid conclusions?

• How does the mind arise from a physical brain?

• Where does knowledge come from?

• How does knowledge lead to action?

Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), was the first to formulate a precise set of laws governing the rational
part of the mind.

He developed an informal system of syllogisms for proper reasoning, which in principle allowed
one to generate conclusions mechanically, given initial premises.

In his 1651 book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes suggested the idea of an “artificial animal,” arguing
“For what is the heart but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so
many wheels.”

It’s one thing to say that the mind operates, at least in part, according to logical rules, and to
build physical systems that emulate some of those rules; it’s another to say that the mind itself is
such a physical system.

The terms in philosophy which is important in terms of AI are

Rationalism: power of reasoning in understanding the world

Dualism: there is a part of the human mind (or soul or spirit) that is outside of nature, exempt
from physical laws

Materialism: brain’s operation according to the laws of physics constitutes the mind

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Induction: general rules are acquired by exposure to repeated associations between their elements

Logical positivism: doctrine holds that all knowledge can be characterized by logical theories
connected, ultimately, to observation sentences that correspond to sensory inputs; thus logical
positivism combines rationalism and empiricism

confirmation theory: attempted to analyze the acquisition of knowledge from experience

Mathematics

What are the formal rules to draw valid conclusions?

What can be computed?

How do we reason with uncertain information?

Philosophers staked out some of the fundamental ideas of AI, but the leap to a formal science
required a level of mathematical formalization in three fundamental areas: logic, computation,
and probability.

The idea of formal logic can be traced back to the philosophers of ancient Greece, but its
mathematical development really began with the work of George Boole (1815–1864),
whoworked out the details of propositional, or Boolean, logic (Boole, 1847).

In 1879, GottlobFrege (1848–1925) extended Boole’s logic to include objects and relations,
creating the firstorder logic that is used today.

Alfred Tarski (1902–1983) introduced a theory of reference that shows how to relate the objects
in a logic to objects in the real world.

Besides logic and computation, the third great contribution of mathematics to AI is the theory of
probability.

Thomas Bayes (1702–1761), proposed a rule for updating probabilities in the light of new
evidence.

Bayes’ rule underlies most modern approaches to uncertain reasoning in AI systems.

Economics

How should we make decisions so as to maximize payoff?

How should we do this when others may not go along?

How should we do this when the payoff may be far in the future?

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The science of economics got its start in 1776, when Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1723–
1790) published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

While the ancient Greeks and others had made contributions to economic thought, Smith was the
first to treat it as a science, using the idea that economies can be thought of as consisting of
individual agents maximizing their own economic well-being.

Most people think of economics as being about money, but economists will say that they are
really studying how people make choices that lead to preferred outcomes.

Decision theory, which combines probability theory with utility theory, provides a formal and
complete framework for decisions (economic or otherwise) made under uncertainty

Neuroscience

How do brains process information?

Neuroscience is the study of the nervous system, particularly the brain.

Although the exact way in which the brain enables thought is one of the great mysteries of
science, the fact that it does enable thought has been appreciated for thousands of years because
of the evidence that strong blows to the head can lead to mental incapacitation.

Psychology

• How do humans and animals think and act?

The origins of scientific psychology are usually traced to the work of the German physicist
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) and his student Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920).

Helmholtz applied the scientific method to the study of human vision, and his Handbook of
Physiological Optics is even now described as “the single most important treatise on the physics
and physiology of human vision”

Computer Engineering

How can we build an efficient computer?

For artificial intelligence to succeed, we need two things: intelligence and an artifact. The
computer has been the artifact of choice.

Control theory and Cybernetics

How can artifacts operate under their own control?

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Ktesibios of Alexandria (c. 250 B.C.) built the first self-controlling machine: a water clock with
a regulator that maintained a constant flow rate. This invention changed the definition of what an
artifact could do.

Linguistics

How does language relate to thought?

In 1957, B. F. Skinner published Verbal Behavior. This was a comprehensive, detailed account
of the behaviorist approach to language learning, written by the foremost expert inthe field.

Modern linguistics and AI, then, were “born” at about the same time, and grew up together,
intersecting in a hybrid field called computational linguistics or natural language processing.

1.2 History of AI

Artificial Intelligence is not a new word and not a new technology for researchers. This
technology is much older than you would imagine. Even there are the myths of Mechanical men
in Ancient Greek and Egyptian Myths. Following are some milestones in the history of AI which
defines the journey from the AI generation to till date development.

Maturation of Artificial Intelligence (1943-1952)

Year 1943: The first work which is now recognized as AI was done by Warren McCulloch and
Walter pits in 1943. They proposed a model of artificial neurons.

Year 1949: Donald Hebb demonstrated an updating rule for modifying the connection strength
between neurons. His rule is now called Hebbian learning.

Year 1950: The Alan Turing who was an English mathematician and pioneered Machine
learning in 1950. Alan Turing publishes "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in which he
proposed a test. The test can check the machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent
to human intelligence, called a Turing test.

The birth of Artificial Intelligence (1952-1956)

Year 1955: An Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon created the "first artificial intelligence
program"Which was named as "Logic Theorist". This program had proved 38 of 52 Mathematics
theorems, and find new and more elegant proofs for some theorems.

Year 1956: The word "Artificial Intelligence" first adopted by American Computer scientist John
McCarthy at the Dartmouth Conference. For the first time, AI coined as an academic field. At
that time high-level computer languages such as FORTRAN, LISP, or COBOL were invented.
And the enthusiasm for AI was very high at that time.

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The golden years-Early enthusiasm (1956-1974)

Year 1966: The researchers emphasized developing algorithms which can solve mathematical
problems. Joseph Weizenbaum created the first chatbot in 1966, which was named as ELIZA.

Year 1972: The first intelligent humanoid robot was built in Japan which was named as
WABOT-1.

The first AI winter (1974-1980)

The duration between years 1974 to 1980 was the first AI winter duration. AI winter refers to the
time period where computer scientist dealt with a severe shortage of funding from government
for AI researches. o During AI winters, an interest of publicity on artificial intelligence was
decreased.

A boom of AI (1980-1987)

Year 1980: After AI winter duration, AI came back with "Expert System". Expert systems were
programmed that emulate the decision-making ability of a human expert.

In the Year 1980, the first national conference of the American Association of Artificial
Intelligence was held at Stanford University.

The second AI winter (1987-1993)

The duration between the years 1987 to 1993 was the second AI Winter duration.

Again Investors and government stopped in funding for AI research as due to high cost but not
efficient result. The expert system such as XCON was very cost effective.

The emergence of intelligent agents (1993-2011)

Year 1997: In the year 1997, IBM Deep Blue beats world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, and
became the first computer to beat a world chess champion.

Year 2002: for the first time, AI entered the home in the form of Roomba, a vacuum cleaner.

Year 2006: AI came in the Business world till the year 2006. Companies like Facebook, Twitter,
and Netflix also started using AI.

Deep learning, big data and artificial general intelligence (2011-present)

Year 2011: In the year 2011, IBM's Watson won jeopardy, a quiz show, where it had to solve the
complex questions as well as riddles. Watson had proved that it could understand natural
language and can solve tricky questions quickly.

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Year 2012: Google has launched an Android app feature "Google now", which was able to
provide information to the user as a prediction.

Year 2014: In the year 2014, Chatbot "Eugene Goostman" won a competition in the infamous
"Turing test."

Year 2018: The "Project Debater" from IBM debated on complex topics with two master
debaters and also performed extremely well.

Google has demonstrated an AI program "Duplex" which was a virtual assistant and P;89+which
had taken hairdresser appointment on call, and lady on other side didn't notice that she was
talking with the machine.

Now AI has developed to a remarkable level.

The concept of Deep learning, big data, and data science are now trending like a boom.
Nowadays companies like Google, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon are working with AI and
creating amazing devices. The future of Artificial Intelligence is inspiring and will come with
high intelligence.

1.4 Intelligent Agents – Agents and Environments

An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and
acting upon that environment through actuators.

An agent can be anything that perceive its environment through sensors and act upon that
environment through actuators.

An Agent runs in the cycle of perceiving, thinking, and acting. An agent can be:

 Human-Agent: A human agent has eyes, ears, and other organs which work for sensors
and hand, legs, vocal tract work for actuators.

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 Robotic Agent: A robotic agent can have cameras, infrared range finder, NLP for sensors
and various motors for actuators.
 Software Agent: Software agent can have keystrokes, file contents as sensory input and
act on those inputs and display output on the screen.

The term percept refer to the agent’s perceptual inputs at any given instant.

An agent’s percept sequence is the complete history of everything the agent has ever perceived.

In general, an agent’s choice of action at any given instant can depend on the entire percept
sequence observed to date, but not on anything it hasn’t perceived.

An agent’s behavior is described by the agent function that maps any given percept sequence to
an action.

Internally, the agent function for an artificial agent will be implemented by an agent program.

Intelligent Agents

An intelligent agent is an autonomous entity which act upon an environment using sensors and
actuators for achieving goals.

An intelligent agent may learn from the environment to achieve their goals. A thermostat is an
example of an intelligent agent.

Following are the main four rules for an AI agent:

 Rule 1: An AI agent must have the ability to perceive the environment.

 Rule 2: The observation must be used to make decisions.
 Rule 3: Decision should result in an action.
 Rule 4: The action taken by an AI agent must be a rational action.

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The Vacuum Cleaner World

This particular world has just two locations: squares A and B.

The vacuum agent perceives which square it is in and whether there is dirt in the square. It can
choose to move left, move right, suck up the dirt, or do nothing.

One very simple agent function is the following: if the current square is dirty, then suck;
otherwise, move to the other square.

A partial tabulation of this agent function is shown in Figure.

And an agent program that implements it appears in Figure

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Percepts: location and contents, e.g., [A,Dirty]

Actions: Left, Right, Suck, NoOp

Agent’s function → look-up table

1.5 Good behavior: The concept of rationality

A rational agent is said to perform the right things. AI is about creating rational agents to use for
game theory and decision theory for various real-world scenarios.

A rational agent is an agent which has clear preference, models uncertainty, and acts in a way to
maximize its performance measure with all possible actions.

For an AI agent, the rational action is most important because in AI reinforcement learning
algorithm, for each best possible action, agent gets the positive reward and for each wrong
action, an agent gets a negative reward.

This notion of desirability is captured by a performance measure that evaluates any given
sequence of environment states.

Vacuum Cleaner Revisited

We might propose to measure performance by the amount of dirt cleaned up in a single eight
hour shift. With a rational agent, of course, what you ask for is what you get.

A rational agent can maximize this performance measure by cleaning up the dirt, then dumping it
all on the floor, then cleaning it up again, and so on.

A more suitable performance measure would reward the agent for having a clean floor. For
example, one point could be awarded for each clean square at each time step (perhaps with a
penalty for electricity consumed and noise generated).

Rationality

The rationality of an agent is measured by its performance measure.

Rationality can be judged on the basis of following points:

 Performance measure which defines the success criterion.

 Agent prior knowledge of its environment.
 Best possible actions that an agent can perform.
 The sequence of percepts.

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1.6 The nature of Environments

Task environments, are essentially the “problems” to which rational agents are the “solutions.”

Task environment used to specify the performance measure, the environment, and the agent’s
actuators and sensors.

We can call it as PEAS which stands for a Performance measure, Environment, Actuator, Sensor.

PEAS System is used to categorize similar agents together. The PEAS system delivers the
performance measure with respect to the environment, actuators, and sensors of the respective
agent. Most of the highest performing agents are Rational Agents.

It is made up of four words:

 P: Performance measure
 E: Environment
 A: Actuators
 S: Sensors

Here performance measure is the objective for the success of an agent's behavior

PEAS for self-driving cars:

Let's suppose a self-driving car then PEAS representation will be:

 Performance: Safety, time, legal drive, comfort

 Environment: Roads, other vehicles, road signs, pedestrian
 Actuators: Steering, accelerator, brake, signal, horn
 Sensors: Camera, GPS, speedometer, odometer, accelerometer, sonar.

Performance Measure

Desirable qualities to measure performance include getting to the correct destination; minimizing
fuel consumption and wear and tear; minimizing the trip time or cost; minimizing violations of
traffic laws and disturbances to other drivers; maximizing safety and passenger comfort;
maximizing profits. Obviously, some of these goals conflict, so tradeoffs will be required.

Environment

Any taxi driver must deal with a variety of roads, ranging from rural lanes and urban alleys to
12-lane freeways. The roads contain other traffic, pedestrians, stray animals, road works, police
cars, puddles, and potholes. The taxi must also interact with potential and actual passengers.
There are also some optional choices. The taxi might need to operate in Southern California,
where snow is seldom a problem, or in Alaska, where it seldom is not. It could always be driving

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on the right, or we might want it to be flexible enough to drive on the left when in Britain or
Japan. Obviously, the more restricted the environment, the easier the design problem.

Actuators
The actuators for an automated taxi include those available to a human driver: control over the
engine through the accelerator and control over steering and braking. In addition, it will need
output to a display screen or voice synthesizer to talk back to the passengers, and perhaps some
way to communicate with other vehicles, politely or otherwise.
Sensors
The basic sensors for the taxi will include one or more controllable video cameras so that it can
see the road; it might augment these with infrared or sonar sensors to detect distances to other
cars and obstacles. To avoid speeding tickets, the taxi should have a speedometer, and to control
the vehicle properly, especially on curves, it should have an accelerometer. To determine the
mechanical state of the vehicle, it will need the usual array of engine, fuel, and electrical system
sensors. Like many human drivers, it might want a global positioning system (GPS) so that it
doesn’t get lost. Finally, it will need a keyboard or microphone for the passenger to request a
destination
Example of Agents with their PEAS representation

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Properties of task environments

An environment in artificial intelligence is the surrounding of the agent. The agent takes input
from the environment through sensors and delivers the output to the environment through
actuators. There are several types of environments:

 Fully Observable vs Partially Observable

 Deterministic vs Stochastic
 Single-agent vs Multi-agent
 Static vs Dynamic
 Discrete vs Continuous
 Episodic vs Sequential
 Known vs Unknown

Fully Observable vs Partially Observable

 When an agent sensor is capable to sense or access the complete state of an agent at each
point in time, it is said to be a fully observable environment else it is partially observable.
 Maintaining a fully observable environment is easy as there is no need to keep track of
the history of the surrounding.
 An environment is called unobservable when the agent has no sensors in all
environments.
 Examples:
o Chess – the board is fully observable, and so are the opponent’s moves.
o Driving – the environment is partially observable because what’s around the
corner is not known.

Deterministic vs Stochastic

 When a uniqueness in the agent’s current state completely determines the next state of
the agent, the environment is said to be deterministic.
 The stochastic environment is random in nature which is not unique and cannot be
completely determined by the agent.
 Examples:
o Chess – there would be only a few possible moves for a coin at the current state
and these moves can be determined.
o Self-Driving Cars- the actions of a self-driving car are not unique, it varies time
to time.

Single-agent vs Multi-agent

 An environment consisting of only one agent is said to be a single-agent environment.

 A person left alone in a maze is an example of the single-agent system.

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 An environment involving more than one agent is a multi-agent environment.

 The game of football is multi-agent as it involves 11 players in each team.

Dynamic vs Static

 An environment that keeps constantly changing itself when the agent is up with some
action is said to be dynamic.
 A roller coaster ride is dynamic as it is set in motion and the environment keeps changing
every instant.
 An idle environment with no change in its state is called a static environment.
 An empty house is static as there’s no change in the surroundings when an agent enters.

Discrete vs Continuous

 If an environment consists of a finite number of actions that can be deliberated in the

environment to obtain the output, it is said to be a discrete environment.
 The game of chess is discrete as it has only a finite number of moves. The number of
moves might vary with every game, but still, it’s finite.
 The environment in which the actions are performed cannot be numbered i.e. is not
discrete, is said to be continuous.
 Self-driving cars are an example of continuous environments as their actions are driving,
parking, etc. which cannot be numbered.

Episodic vs Sequential

 In an Episodic task environment, each of the agent’s actions is divided into atomic
incidents or episodes. There is no dependency between current and previous incidents. In
each incident, an agent receives input from the environment and then performs the
corresponding action.
 Example: Consider an example of Pick and Place robot, which is used to detect defective
parts from the conveyor belts. Here, every time robot (agent) will make the decision on
the current part i.e. there is no dependency between current and previous decisions.
 In a Sequential environment, the previous decisions can affect all future decisions. The
next action of the agent depends on what action he has taken previously and what action
he is supposed to take in the future.
 Example:
o Checkers- Where the previous move can affect all the following moves.

Known vs Unknown

In a known environment, the output for all probable actions is given. Obviously, in case of
unknown environment, for an agent to make a decision, it has to gain knowledge about how the
environment works.

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1.7 The structure of Agents

The job of AI is to design an agent program that implements the agent function the mapping
from percepts to actions.

This program will run on some sort of computing device with physical sensors and actuators
called the architecture.

agent = architecture + program

Architecture makes the percepts from the sensors available to the program, runs the program, and
feeds the program’s action choices to the actuators as they are generated.

Agent program: use current percept as input from the sensors and return an action to the
actuators.

Agent function: takes the entire percept history

Table Driven Approach

To build a rational agent in this way, we as designers must construct a table that contains the
appropriate action for every possible percept sequence.

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Let P be the set of possible percepts and let T be the lifetime of the agent (the total number of
percepts it will receive)

The lookup table will contain entries.

Consider the automated taxi: the visual input from a single camera comes in at the rate of
roughly 27 megabytes per second (30 frames per second, 640 × 480 pixels with 24 bits of color
information). This gives a lookup table with over 10250,000,000,000 entries for an hour’s
driving.

Even the lookup table for chess a tiny, well-behaved fragment of the real world would have at
least 10150 entries.

The daunting size of these tables (the number of atoms in the observable universe is less than
1080) means that

 no physical agent in this universe will have the space to store the table,
 the designer would not have time to create the table,
 no agent could ever learn all the right table entries from its experience, and
 even if the environment is simple enough to yield a feasible table size, the designer still
has no guidance about how to fill in the table entries.

Types of Agent Programs

Four basic kinds of agent programs that embody the principles underlying almost all intelligent
systems:

1. Simple reflex agents;

2. Model-based reflex agents;
3. Goal-based agents; and
4. Utility-based agents

Simple reflex agents

 Select actions on the basis of the current percept, ignoring the rest of the percept history
 Agents do not have memory of past world states or percepts.
 So, actions depend solely on current percept. Action becomes a “reflex.”

Agents select actions on the basis of the current percept, ignoring the rest of the percept history.
For example, the vacuum agent is a simple reflex agent, because its decision is based only on the
current location and on whether that location contains dirt. An agent program for this agent is
shown in Figure.

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Simple reflex behaviors occur even in more complex environments. Imagine yourself as the
driver of the automated taxi. If the car in front brakes and its brake lights come on, then you
should notice this and initiate braking. In other words, some processing is done on the visual
input to establish the condition we call “The car in front is braking.” Then, this triggers some
established connection in the agent program to the action “initiate braking.” We call such a
connection a condition–action rule, written as

if car-in-front-is-braking then initiate-braking

Figure below gives the structure of the general program in schematic form, showing how the
condition–action rules allow the agent to make the connection from percept to action.

The agent program, which is also very simple, is shown in Figure below.

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The INTERPRET-INPUT function generates an abstracted description of the current state from
the percept, and.

The RULE-MATCH function returns the first rule in the set of rules that matches the given state
description.

This will work only if the correct decision can be made on the basis of only the current percept—
that is, only if the environment is fully observable.

Even a little bit of unobservability can cause serious trouble. For example, the braking rule given
earlier assumes that the condition car-in-front-is-braking can be determined from the current
percept—a single frame of video. This works if the car in front has a centrally mounted brake
light.

Infinite loops are often unavoidable for simple reflex agents operating in partially observable
environments. Escape from infinite loops is possible if the agent can randomize its actions.

Model-based reflex agents

It works by finding a rule whose condition matches the current situation

Key difference (with respect to simple reflex agents):

 Agents have internal state, which is used to keep track of past states of the world.
 Agents have the ability to represent change in the World.

The current state is stored inside the agent which maintains some kind of structure describing the
part of the world which cannot be seen.

Internal state information as time goes by requires two kinds of knowledge to be encoded in the
agent program

 we need some information about how the world evolves independently of the agent
 we need some information about how the agent’s own actions affect the world
Knowledge about “how the world works is called a model of the world.

An agent that uses such a model is called a model-based agent.

Figure below gives the structure of the model-based reflex agent with internal state, showing
how the current percept is combined with the old internal state to generate the updated
description of the current state, based on the agent’s model of how the world works.

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The agent program is shown in Figure below. UPDATE-STATE, which is responsible for
creating the new internal state description

Goal-based agents

Knowing something about the current state of the environment is not always enough to decide
what to do. For example, at a road junction, the taxi can turn left, turn right, or go straight on.
The correct decision depends on where the taxi is trying to get to. In other words, as well as a
current state description, the agent needs some sort of goal information that describes situations
that are desirable—for example, being at the passenger’s destination. The agent program can
combine this with the model (the same information as was used in the model based reflex agent)
to choose actions that achieve the goal.

Figure below shows the goal-based agent’s structure

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 Sometimes goal-based action selection is straightforward—for example, when goal

satisfaction results immediately from a single action.
 Sometimes it will be trickier—for example, when the agent has to consider long
sequences of twists and turns in order to find a way to achieve the goal.
 Search and planning are the subfields of AI devoted to finding action sequences that
achieve the agent’s goals.

Utility-based agents

Goals alone are not enough to generate high-quality behavior in most environments. Goals just
provide a crude binary distinction between “happy” and “unhappy” states. Because “happy” does
not sound very scientific, economists and computer scientists use the term utility instead

An agent’s utility function is essentially an internalization of the performance measure. If the

internal utility function and the external performance measure are in agreement, then an agent
that chooses actions to maximize its utility will be rational according to the external performance
measure.

The utility-based agent structure appears in Figure below.

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Learning agents

A learning agent can be divided into four conceptual components, as shown in Figure below.

 Learning Element
 Performance Element
 Critic
 Problem Generator

The most important distinction is between the learning element, which is responsible for making
improvements, and the performance element, which is responsible for selecting external actions.

The performance element is what we have previously considered to be the entire agent: it takes
in percepts and decides on actions.

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The learning element uses CRITIC feedback from the critic on how the agent is doing and
determines how the performance element should be modified to do better in the future.

The critic tells the learning element how well the agent is doing with respect to a fixed
performance standard. The critic is necessary because the percepts themselves provide no
indication of the agent’s success.

The last component of the learning agent is the problem generator. It is responsible for
suggesting actions that will lead to new and informative experiences.

How the components of agent programs work (Agent Transitions)

We can place the representations along an axis of increasing complexity and expressive power—

 atomic,
 factored, and
 structured.

Atomic representation

In an atomic representation each state of the world is indivisible—it has no internal structure.
Consider the problem of finding a driving route from one end of a country to the other via some
sequence of cities. For the purposes of solving this problem, it may suffice to reduce the state of
world to just the name of the city we are in—a single atom of knowledge; a “black box” whose
only discernible property is that of being identical to or different from another black box.

The algorithms underlying search and game-playing, Hidden Markov models, and Markov
decision processes all work with atomic representations.

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Factored Representation

A factored representation splits up each state into a fixed set of variables or attributes, each of
which can have a value. While two different atomic states ATTRIBUTE VALUE have nothing
in common—they are just different black boxes—two different factored states can share some
attributes (such as being at some particular GPS location) and not others (such as having lots of
gas or having no gas); this makes it much easier to work out how to turn one state into another.

With factored representations, we can also represent uncertainty—for example, ignorance about
the amount of gas in the tank can be represented by leaving that attribute blank.

Many important areas of AI are based on factored representations, including constraint

satisfaction algorithms, propositional logic, planning, and Bayesian networks.

Structured Representation

In a structured representation, objects and their various and varying relationships can be
described explicitly. Structured representations underlie relational databases and first-order logic,
first-order probability models, knowledge-based learning and much of natural language
understanding.

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