1. Introduction

1. Purpose: Act rationally
2. Definitions

• Agent: is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through actuators.

• Agent function: maps from percept histories to actions.

• Agent program runs on the physical architecture to produce the agent function.

  Agent = Architecture + Program

  → The agent function is an abstract mathematical description; the agent program is a concrete implementation, running within some physical system.

2. Agent Rationality

• A rational agent is one that does the right thing = the action that makes the agent MOST SUCCESSFUL.

• Rationality depends on:

  • Performance measure (!!!!)

  • Prior knowledge of the environment

  • Percept sequence

  • Actions that agent can perform

→ The PERFORMANCE MEASURE is the criterion for judging of the success of an agents’ behaviour.

• For each possible percept sequence, a rational agent should select an action that: Maximise performance measure.

→ INFORMATION GATHERING is important!!!

3. PEAS

• Performance measure
• Environment
• Actuators
• Sensors

3.1. Environment types