Knowledge Representation

AGENT
▪ Anything that perceives environment through sensors and act upon that
environment through actuators.
▪ An agent is a computer program or system that is designed to perceive its
environment, make decisions and take actions to achieve a specific goal or
set of goals.
▪ 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.
▪ 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.
▪ World around us is full of agents such as thermostat, cellphone, camera,
and even we are also agents.

2
AGENT – COMPONENTS

3
AGENT – SIMPLE REFLEX AGENT
The Simple reflex agents are the simplest agents. These agents take decisions on the basis of
the current percepts and ignore the rest of the percept history.
It doesn’t consider any a part of percepts history during their decision and action process

Condition-action rule suggests to map the present state to action

Ex: Robotic vacuum cleaner - it works as

long as there’s dirt within the room

4
AGENT – MODEL BASED REFLEX AGENT
These are the agents with memory. It stores the information about the previous state, the current
state and performs the action accordingly.
Model: It’s knowledge about “how things happen within the world.
Internal State: It’s a representation of the present state-based on percept history.
The previous and the current state get updated quickly for deciding the action.

Ex: Self-steering mobile vision

5
AGENT – GOAL BASED AGENT
The information of the current state may not help in making the right decision.
If the goal is known, then the agent takes into account the goal information besides the current state
information to make the right decision.

Ex: Searching robot - if the agent is a self-driving car and the goal is the destination,
then the information of the route to the destination helps the car in deciding when to
turn left or right.

6
AGENT – UTILITY BASED AGENT
There can be many possible sequences to achieve the goal, but some will be better than others.
The utility is a function that maps a state to a real number that describes the degree of happiness. The
utility function specifies the appropriate trade-off in case the goals are conflicting.

Ex: Route recommendation system

7
AGENT – LEARNING AGENT
These are agents that have the capability of learning from their previous experience.

•Critic: The Critic evaluates how well is the agent performing vis-à-vis the set performance
benchmark.
•Learning Elements: It takes input from the Critic and helps Agent improve performance by
learning from the environment.
•Performance Element: This component decides on the action to be taken to improve the
performance.
•Problem Generator: Problem Generator takes input from other components and suggests actions
resulting in a better experience.

8
KNOWLEDGE-BASED AGENT IN AI

▪ An intelligent agent needs knowledge about the real world for taking decisions
and reasoning to act efficiently.
▪ Knowledge-based agents are those agents who have the capability of maintaining
an internal state of knowledge, reason over that knowledge, update their
knowledge after observations and take actions. These agents can represent
the world with some formal representation and act intelligently.
▪ Knowledge-base is required for updating knowledge for an agent to learn with
experiences and take action as per the knowledge.
▪ Knowledge-based agents are composed of two main parts:
▪ Knowledge-base and
▪ Inference system.

9
KNOWLEDGE-BASED AGENT ARCHITECTURE
Knowledge base: It is a collection of sentences. These sentences are expressed in a language which is
called a knowledge representation language. The Knowledge-base of KBA stores fact about the world.
Inference system: Inference means deriving new sentences from old. Inference system allows us to
add a new sentence to the knowledge base. A sentence is a proposition about the world. Inference
system applies logical rules to the KB to deduce new information. Inference system generates new facts
so that an agent can update the KB. An inference system works mainly in two rules:
• Forward chaining
• Backward chaining

10
OPERATIONS PERFORMED BY KBA

▪ TELL: This operation tells the knowledge base what it perceives from the
environment.
▪ ASK: This operation asks the knowledge base what action it should perform.
▪ Perform: It performs the selected action.

11
 KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION

▪ How machines do all these (understanding, reasoning, interpreting knowledge)

things comes under knowledge representation and reasoning.
▪ Knowledge representation and reasoning concerned with AI agents thinking and
how thinking contributes to intelligent behavior of agents.
▪ It is responsible for representing information about the real world so that a
computer can understand and can utilize this knowledge to solve the complex real
world problems such as diagnosis a medical condition or communicating with
humans in natural language.
▪ It also enables an intelligent machine to learn from that knowledge and
experiences so that it can behave intelligently like a human.

12
KNOWLEDGE TO REPRESENT

▪ Object: All the facts about objects in our world domain. E.g., Guitars contains
strings, trumpets are brass instruments.
▪ Events: Events are the actions which occur in our world.
▪ Performance: It describes behavior which involves knowledge about how to do
things.
▪ Meta-knowledge: It is knowledge about what we know.
▪ Facts: Facts are the truths about the real world and what we represent.
▪ Knowledge-Base: The central component of the knowledge-based agents is the
knowledge base. It is represented as KB. The Knowledgebase is a group of the
Sentences (Here, sentences are used as a technical term and not identical with the
English language).

13
APPROACHES TO KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION

▪ Simple relational knowledge

It is the simplest way of storing facts which uses the relational method. Here, all the facts about a
set of the object are set out systematically in columns. Also, this approach of knowledge
representation is famous in database systems where the relationship between different entities is
represented. Thus, there is little opportunity for inference.
Example:
This is an example of representing simple relational knowledge.

Name Age Emp ID

John 25 100071
Amanda 23 100056
Sam 27 100042
14
APPROACHES TO KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION

▪ Inheritable knowledge

15
APPROACHES TO KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION

▪ Inferential knowledge
▪ Example: Let's suppose there are two statements: Marcus is a man
▪ All men are mortal
Then it can represent as;

man(Marcus)
∀x = man (x) ----------> mortal (x)

16
APPROACHES TO KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION

▪ Procedural knowledge
▪ Procedural knowledge approach uses small programs and codes which describes how to
do specific things, and how to proceed.
▪ In this approach, one important rule is used which is If-Then rule.

17