Artificial Intelligence/Intelligent Agents

This page discusses the general ideas, and overall implementation of an intelligent agent.

Terminology

• PEAS - An abbreviation to remember the "basics" of a functioning agent.
  • Stands for "Performance Measures, Environment, Actuators, Sensors"
• Sensor - A device that takes some form of input from the surrounding environment.
• Actuator - A device that achieves physical movement of some kind, by converting energy into mechanical force.

What is an Agent?

As mentioned in Artificial Intelligence, an "Intelligent Agent" is an entity that can act.
It generally acts to achieve the "best possible" outcome, and uses information from the surrounding environment in some manner.

To elaborate, an Intelligent Agent acquires environmental information via some form of sensors.
And it often acts upon that environment through some sort of actuators.

Said actions will depend on the agent's programming, as well as the current input from its sensors.
It may process this input using one (or multiple) of the following:

• Reasoning via probabilities and statistics.
• Decisions via Bayesian Networks, analysis of observation (sensory) sequences, or other methods.
• Learning via training from statistical models, neural networks, and other data-driven methods.

Types of Sensors

Sensors are anything which detect or otherwise mimic input of the 5 human senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste), or even other values that humans can't inherently detect. Includes:

• Cameras - Mimics "sight" in the form of continuous image sequences.
• Microphones - Mimics "sound" in the form of wavelength sequences.
• Thermometers - Mimics "touch" in the form of detecting temperature.
• Current & Voltage Sensors - Detects electricity through a given circuit.
• Chemical & Gas Sensors - Detects environmental composition.
• Etc

What sensor an AI uses heavily depends on the AI's application, as well as the environment it will reside in.
For example, an AI that exists within a closed, indoor space may never need a thermometer.
Meanwhile, a self-driving car AI may need a thermometer to help detect the type of weather its driving in.