Artificial Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence and Agents

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Abstract

The history of AI is a history of fantasies, possibilities, demonstrations, and promise. Ever since Homer wrote of mechanical “tripods” waiting on the gods at dinner, imagined mechanical assistants have been a part of our culture. However, only in the last half century have we, the AI community, been able to build experimental machines that test hypotheses about the mechanisms of thought and intelligent behavior and thereby demonstrate mechanisms that formerly existed only as theoretical possibilities. – Bruce Buchanan [2005] This book is about artificial intelligence, a field built on centuries of thought, which has been a recognized discipline for over 60 years. As Buchanan points out in the quote above, we now have the tools to test hypotheses about the nature of thought itself, as well as to solve practical tasks. Deep scientific and engineering problems have already been solved and many more are waiting to be solved. Many practical applications are currently deployed and the potential exists for an almost unlimited number of future applications. In this book, we present the principles that underlie intelligent computational agents. These principles can help you understand current and future work in AI and equip you to contribute to the discipline yourself. What is Artificial Intelligence? Artificial intelligence , or AI , is the field that studies the synthesis and analysis of computational agents that act intelligently . Let us examine each part of this definition. An agent is something that acts in an environment; it does something. Agents include worms, dogs, thermostats, airplanes, robots, humans, companies, and countries. We are interested in what an agent does; that is, how it acts . We judge an agent by its actions. An agent acts intelligently when • what it does is appropriate for its circumstances and its goals, taking into account the short-term and long-term consequences of its actions • it is flexible to changing environments and changing goals • it learns from experience • it makes appropriate choices given its perceptual and computational limitations A computational agent is an agent whose decisions about its actions can be explained in terms of computation. That is, the decision can be broken down into primitive operations that can be implemented in a physical device.