INTELLIGENT ARTICLE

Intelligent Article

Intelligent Article

Introduction

This paper is an article summary of "Intelligent agent" technology staging a comeback” written by Paul Festa on CNET News.

Definition

There is one more thing to deal with in the definition of an ideal rational agent: the “built-in knowledge” part. If the agent's actions are based completely on built-in knowledge, such that it AUTONOMY need pay no attention to its percepts, then we say that the agent lacks autonomy. For example, if the clock manufacturer was prescient enough to know that the clock's owner would be going to Australia at some particular date, then a mechanism could be built in to adjust the hands automatically by six hours at just the right time. This would certainly be successful behavior, but the intelligence seems to belong to the clock's designer rather than to the clock itself.

Summary

The article says that an agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through effectors. A human agent has eyes, ears, and other organs for sensors, and hands, legs, mouth, and other body parts for effectors. A robotic agent substitutes cameras and infrared range finders for the sensors and various motors for the effectors. A software agent has encoded bit strings as its percepts and actions.

A rational agent is one that does the right thing. Obviously, this is better than doing the wrong thing, but what does it mean? As a first approximation, we will say that the right action is the one that will cause the agent to be most successful. That leaves us with the problem of deciding how and when to evaluate the agent's success.

We use the term performance measure for the how—the criteria that determine how MEASURE successful an agent is. Obviously, there ...