Artificial Agent

>>>> Chapter one, Artificial Agent <<<<

Artificial Agent The word "agent" is derived from the concept of agency which means employing someone to act on behalf of the users. An agent is something that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through actuators. An human agent has eyes, ears and other organs for sensors and body parts like hands, legs, mouth etc, for actuators, A software agent receives keystrokes, file contents and networking packets as sensory inputs and acts on the environment by displaying on the screen, writing files and sending network packets. Computer agent (or software agents) have several characteristics which distinguish them from every programs. They are: Capability to work on their own (autonomy) Perceiving their environment Persisting over a prolonged time period Adapting to change (adaptivity) Capable of taking on another's goal (goal oriented) Transportable over networks (mobility) Ability to interact with humans, systems and other agents (communicative) Ability to learn In AI, we use the term "intelligent agent" which represent a new technology for software programs. AI is about the design and implementation of intelligent agents. Turing suggested that a system or agent can be said to be intelligent when the agent's performance cannto be distinguished from that of a human performing the same task. A better definition of artificial agent is: An intelligent agent is a software entity which senses its environment and then carries out some set of operations on behalf of a user (or a program), with some degree of autonomy, and in doing so employs some knowledge or representation of the user's goals or desires.  In other words, AI are software programs which work in the background to carry out specific, repetitive, predictable task for an individual user, business processor software application.  Structure of Agent A simple agent program can be defined mathematically by an agent function which maps every possible percept sequences to a possible action to the agent. That is,  f : p * ---------> A So the agent program run on the physical architecture and that implement the agent function 'f'. That is, agent = Architecture + Program. For example: A Vacuum Cleaner: Environment Percept Action Square A and B [location, content] [A, Clean] [A, Dirty] [B, Clean] [B, Dirty] ............... Right  Suck Left  Suck ................. The Pro log programming  function RVF ([location, status]) return  an action if (status == dirty) then  return suck else if (location == A) then  return right else return left