Artificial Intelligence (Part 3)

Agents and Environments

Welcome to Part 3 of AI. If you haven’t gone through the Part 1 and Part 2 of AI click here Part-1 Part-2. In this post we can discuss about the agents and environments in AI.

Rationality:

So far we have seen the definition and types of Artificial Intelligence. Now we are going to see about some things which shows how AI works. There is a term called rationality. A system or model is rational if it does the right thing based on what it knows.

AI is also defined as the study of rational agents. A rational agent could be anything which makes decisions as a person, firm, machine, or software. It carries out an action with the best outcome after considering past and current experience.

Agents:

An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through actuators.

Agents interact with the environment through sensors and actuators

Sensor is a device which detects or measures input from its environment and converts it into data that can understandable.

Actuator is a device that makes something to move, operate or to control.

Examples of agent:

• Human agent has eyes, ears, and other organs for sensors and hands, legs, vocal tract for actuators
• Robotic agent have cameras and infrared range finders for sensors and various motors for actuators.

Let us see an example to understand how it works:

Take an example of vacuum cleaner. Here vacuum cleaner is our agent. There are only two locations Square A and Square B. The vacuum agent can understand which square it is in and whether there is dirt in that square or not.

It can move left, move right, suck the dirt or do nothing. The function of this agent is if the current square is dirty, then suck. Otherwise move to next square.

Vacuum cleaner agent with two locations

Tabulation of a simple agent function of vacuum cleaner

Agent Program for the above situation

If the agent performs all the functions in a correct way given that the other measures are also satisfied then the vacuum cleaner agent is said to be a rational agent.

Types of Agents:

Agents are grouped into five classes based on their capability and Intelligence. We are not going to see about each type of agent because it will be confusing at this stage. But it is required to know what are those five agents. The five agents are

• Simple reflex agents
• Model based reflex agents
• Goal based agents
• Utility based agents
• Learning agents

Environment:

An environment is everything in the world which surrounds the agent, but it is not a part of an agent itself. The environment is where agent lives, operate and provide the agent with something to sense and act upon it.

The performance measure, Environment and the agent’s actuators and sensors are grouped under a heading called task environment. It can be called as PEAS description which stands for Performance, Environment, Actuators, Sensors .

Let us see few examples of agent types and their PEAS description

In designing an agent, the first step must always be to specify the task environment as fully as possible. So it is very important to to find it using PEAS description.

Thanks for reading. Do read the further posts on AI. Please feel free to connect with me if you have any doubts. Do follow, support, like and subscribe this blog.

Fact of the day:

Humans can develop romantic relationships with AI. It is believed that by 2050 marriages between humans and robots will be made legal. Just you have to wait for 30 more years and you can give it a try😝