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Lecture 2a -- Rational Agents

The lecture discusses the concept of agents, which perceive their environment through sensors and act upon it through actuators. It introduces various types of agents, including humans and robots, and emphasizes the importance of rationality in agent behavior, which is determined by performance measures and available actions. The PEAS framework is presented for specifying task environments, exemplified by an automated taxi driver.

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Muhammad Shoaib
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2 views15 pages

Lecture 2a -- Rational Agents

The lecture discusses the concept of agents, which perceive their environment through sensors and act upon it through actuators. It introduces various types of agents, including humans and robots, and emphasizes the importance of rationality in agent behavior, which is determined by performance measures and available actions. The PEAS framework is presented for specifying task environments, exemplified by an automated taxi driver.

Uploaded by

Muhammad Shoaib
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Artificial Intelligence

Lecture 2: Agents

Srini Narayanan – ICSI and UC Berkeley


Many slides from Dan Klein, Mitch Marcus
Today
▪ Agents and Environments

▪ Reflex Agents

▪ Environment Types

▪ Problem-Solving Agents
Agents
▪ An agent is anything that can be viewed as
▪ perceiving its environment through sensors and
▪ acting upon that environment through actuators
▪ Human agent:
▪ Sensors: eyes, ears, ...
▪ Actuators: hands, legs, mouth, …
▪ Robotic agent:
▪ Sensors: cameras and infrared range finders
▪ Actuators: various motors
Agents and Environments
▪ Agents include: The line between agent
▪ Humans and environment depends
▪ Robots on the level of abstraction.
▪ Softbots
▪ Thermostats
▪ …

▪ The agent function maps from


percept histories to actions:

▪ An agent program running on the Always think of the environment


physical architecture to produce the
as a black box, completely
agent function.
external to the agent – even if
it’s simulated by local code.
Example: A Vacuum-cleaner agent

A B

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


▪ (Idealization: locations are discrete)
▪ Actions: LEFT, RIGHT, SUCK, NOP
A Reflex Vacuum-Cleaner
Rationality
▪ Rationality depends on:
▪ Performance measure
▪ Agent’s (prior) knowledge of the environment
▪ Agent’s percept sequence to date
▪ Available actions
▪ A fixed performance measure evaluates the environment sequence
▪ One point per clean square at time T?
▪ One point per clean square per time step, minus one per move?
▪ Penalize for > k dirty squares?
▪ Reward should indicate success, not steps to success
▪ A rational agent chooses whichever action maximizes the expected
value of the performance measure given the percept sequence to
date
▪ Is it rational to inspect the street before crossing?
▪ Rationality gives rise to: exploration, learning, autonomy
Task environment
▪ To design a rational agent we need to specify a
task environment
▪ a problem specification for which the agent is a
solution

▪ PEAS: to specify a task environment


▪ Performance measure
▪ Environment
▪ Actuators
▪ Sensors
PEAS: Specifying an automated
taxi driver

Performance measure:
▪ ?
Environment:
▪ ?
Actuators:
▪ ?
Sensors:
▪ ?
PEAS: Specifying an automated
taxi driver

Performance measure:
▪ safety, speed, legal, comfortable, maximize profits
Environment:
▪ ?
Actuators:
▪ ?
Sensors:
▪ ?
PEAS: Specifying an automated
taxi driver

Performance measure:
▪ safe, fast, legal, comfortable, maximize profits
Environment:
▪ roads, other traffic, pedestrians, customers
Actuators:
▪ ?
Sensors:
▪ ?
PEAS: Specifying an automated
taxi driver

Performance measure:
▪ safe, fast, legal, comfortable, maximize profits
Environment:
▪ roads, other traffic, pedestrians, customers
Actuators:
▪ steering, accelerator, brake, signal, horn
Sensors:
▪ ?
PEAS: Specifying an automated
taxi driver

Performance measure:
▪ safe, fast, legal, comfortable, maximize profits
Environment:
▪ roads, other traffic, pedestrians, customers
Actuators:
▪ steering, accelerator, brake, signal, horn
Sensors:
▪ cameras, speedometer, GPS, keyboard,
microphone

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