Third edition of Artificial Intelligence: foundations of computational agents, Cambridge University Press, 2023 is now available (including the full text).

2.6 Review

The main points you should have learned from this chapter are as follows:

  • An agent system is composed of an agent and an environment.
  • Agents have sensors and actuators to interact with the environment.
  • An agent is composed of a body and interacting controllers.
  • Agents are situated in time and must make decisions of what to do based on their history of interaction with the environment.
  • An agent has direct access not to its history, but to what it has remembered (its belief state) and what it has just observed. At each point in time, an agent decides what to do and what to remember based on its belief state and its current observations.
  • Complex agents are built modularly in terms of interacting hierarchical layers.
  • An intelligent agent requires knowledge that is acquired at design time, offline or online.