Hawassa University (Bensa Daye Campus)

Department of Computer Science

3rd year
Course Title: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Course Code: CoSc3081

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 CHAPTER TWO
INTELLIGENT
AGENTS

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 Introduction
An intelligent agent (IA) is an entity that makes a decision or it
enables artificial intelligence to take action.

It can also be described as a software entity that conducts

operations in the place of users or programs after sensing the
environment.

It uses actuators to initiate action in that environment.

It’s also termed as ‘intelligent’ because of its ability to learn

during the process of performing tasks.
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 Cont’d…
The two main functions of intelligent agents include
 perception and

 action

Perception is done through sensors while actions are initiated

through actuators.

Intelligent agents consist of sub-agents that form a hierarchical

structure. Lower-level tasks are performed by these sub-agents.

The higher-level agents and lower-level agents form a complete

system that can solve difficult problems through intelligent

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behaviors or responses.
 Characteristics of intelligent agents
Intelligent agents have the following distinguishing
characteristics:
They have some level of autonomy that allows them to perform

certain tasks on their own.

They have a learning ability that enables them to learn even as

tasks are carried out.

They can interact with other entities such as agents, humans,

and systems.
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 Cont’d…
 New rules can be accommodated by intelligent agents

incrementally.
 They exhibit goal-oriented habits.

 They are knowledge-based.

 They use knowledge regarding communications,

processes, and entities.

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 How intelligent agents work
Intelligent agents work through three main components:
sensors, actuators, and effectors.

Fig 1 Position of components in the AI system

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 Cont’d
Sensors: These are devices that detect any changes in the
environment.
This information is sent to other devices.
In artificial intelligence, the environment of the system is
observed by intelligent agents through sensors.
Actuators: These are components through which energy is
converted into motion.
They perform the role of controlling and moving a system.
Examples include rails, motors, and gears.
Effectors: The environment is affected by effectors.
 Examples include legs, fingers, wheels, display screen, and
arms.

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 Agents and Environments
What is an Agent?
An agent can be anything that perceive its environment through

sensors and act upon that environment through actuators.

An Agent runs in the cycle of perceiving, thinking, and acting.

An agent can be:

Human-Agent: A human agent has eyes, ears, and other organs

which work for sensors and hand, legs, vocal tract work for
actuators.
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 Cont’d
 Robotic Agent: A robotic agent can have cameras, infrared

range finder, NLP for sensors and various motors for

actuators.
 Software Agent: Software agent can have keystrokes, file

contents as sensory input and act on those inputs and display

output on the screen.

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 Cont’d…
An AI system is composed of an agent and its environment.

The agents act in their environment. The environment may

contain other agents.

An agent is anything that can be viewed as :

 perceiving its environment through sensors and

 acting upon that environment through actuators

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 Rules for AI agent
 Following are the main four rules for an AI agent:

 Rule 1: An AI agent must have the ability to perceive the

environment.
 Rule 2: The observation must be used to make decisions.

 Rule 3: Decision should result in an action.

 Rule 4: The action taken by an AI agent must be a rational

action.

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 Agent Terminology
 Performance Measure of Agent − It is the criteria, which

determines how successful an agent is.

 Behavior of Agent − It is the action that agent performs after any

given sequence of percepts.

 Percept − It is agent’s perceptual inputs at a given instance.

 Percept Sequence − It is the history of all that an agent has

perceived till date.

 Agent Function − It is a map from the precept sequence to an

action.
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 Environment
 An environment is everything in the world which surrounds the

agent, but it is not a part of an agent itself.

 An environment can be described as a situation in which an

agent is present.
 The environment is where agent lives, operate and provide the

agent with something to sense and act upon it.

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 Properties of Environment
The environment has multifold properties such as:
Discrete / Continuous − If there are a limited number of distinct,

clearly defined, states of the environment, the environment is discrete

(For example, chess); otherwise it is continuous (For example,
driving).
Observable / Partially Observable − If it is possible to determine

the complete state of the environment at each time point from the
percepts it is observable; otherwise it is only partially observable.

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 Cont’d…
 Static / Dynamic − If the environment does not change

while an agent is acting, then it is static; otherwise it is

dynamic.
 Accessible / Inaccessible − If the agent’s sensory apparatus

can have access to the complete state of the environment,

then the environment is accessible to that agent.

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 Cont’d
 Deterministic / Non-deterministic − If the next state of the
environment is completely determined by the current state and the
actions of the agent, then the environment is deterministic; otherwise it
is non-deterministic.
 Episodic / Non-episodic − In an episodic environment, each episode

consists of the agent perceiving and then acting.

o The quality of its action depends just on the episode itself.

o Subsequent episodes do not depend on the actions in the previous

episodes.
o Episodic environments are much simpler than non -episodic because the

17 agent does not need to think ahead.

 Rationality Vs Omniscience
 A rational agent is one that does the right thing.
 A sequence of actions causes the environment to go through a
sequence of states.
 If the sequence is desirable, then the agent has performed
well.
 The notion of desirability is captured by a performance
measure that evaluates any given sequence of environment
states.
 A rational agent chooses whichever action maximizes the
expected value of the performance measure given the percept
sequence.
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 Cont’d…

 Rationality is nothing but status of being reasonable,

sensible, and having good sense of judgment.

 Rationality is concerned with expected actions and results

depending upon what the agent has perceived.

 Performing actions with the aim of obtaining useful

information is an important part of rationality.

 A rational agent should be autonomous.

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 Cont’d…
 Rationality of an agent depends on the following four

factors
 The performance measures, which determine the degree

of success.
 Agent’s Percept Sequence till now.

 The agent’s prior knowledge about the environment.

 The actions that the agent can carry out.

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 Omniscient Agent
 An omniscient (perfect) agent knows the actual outcome of its actions

and can act accordingly; but perfection is impossible in reality.

 Omniscience is the state of possessing unlimited knowledge about all

things possible.
 Rationality is NOT the same as perfection.

 Rationality maximizes expected performance, while perfection

maximizes actual performance.
 Omniscience: knowing actual outcome of all actions

 Rationality: knowing plausible outcome of all actions

– Example: is crossing the street to greet a friend too risky?

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 Structure of Intelligent Agents
The IA structure consists of three main parts: architecture, agent
function, and agent program.
1. Architecture: This refers to machinery or devices that consists of
actuators and sensors.
The intelligent agent executes on this machinery. Examples include
a personal computer, a car, or a camera.
2. Agent function: This is a function in which actions are mapped
from a certain percept sequence. Percept sequence refers to a history
of what the intelligent agent has perceived.
3. Agent program: This is an implementation or execution of the
agent function.
The agent function is produced through the agent program’s execution
on the physical architecture.

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 PEAS Representation

PEAS is a type of model on which an AI agent works upon.

When we define an AI agent or rational agent, then we can group its

properties under PEAS representation model. It is made up of four
words:
P: Performance measure

E: Environment

A: Actuators

S: Sensors

Here performance measure is the objective for the success of an

24 agent's behavior.
 Example: PEAS for self-driving cars

Let's suppose a self-driving car then PEAS representation will be:

Performance: Safety, time, legal drive, comfort

Environment: Roads, other vehicles, road signs, pedestrian

Actuators: Steering, accelerator, brake, signal, horn

Sensors: Camera, GPS, speedometer, odometer, accelerometer,

sonar.

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 Example of Agents with their PEAS
representation

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 Types of AI Agents
 Agents can be grouped into five classes based on their degree of

perceived intelligence and capability.

 All these agents can improve their performance and generate

better action over the time. These are given below:

 Simple Reflex Agent

 Model-based reflex agent

 Goal-based agents

 Utility-based agent

 Learning agent

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 Simple Reflex Agent
 The Simple reflex agents are the simplest agents.
 These agents take decisions on the basis of the current percepts and
ignore the rest of the percept history.
 These agents only succeed in the fully observable environment.
 The Simple reflex agent works on Condition-action rule, which
means it maps the current state to action. Example: a Room Cleaner
agent, it works only if there is dirt in the room.
 Problems for the simple reflex agent design approach
 They have very limited intelligence
 They do not have knowledge of non-perceptual parts of the
current state
 Mostly too big to generate and to store.
 Not adaptive to changes in the environment.

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 Cont’d

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 Model-based reflex agent
 The Model-based agent can work in a partially observable
environment, and track the situation.
 A model-based agent has two important factors:
o Model: It is knowledge about "how things happen in the world,"
so it is called a Model-based agent.
o Internal State: It is a representation of the current state based on
percept history.
 These agents have the model, "which is knowledge of the world"
and based on the model they perform actions.
 Updating the agent state requires information about:
 How the world evolves
 How the agent's action affects the world.

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 Cont’d

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 Goal-based agents
 The knowledge of the current state environment is not always sufficient to

decide for an agent to what to do.

 The agent needs to know its goal which describes desirable situations.

 Goal-based agents expand the capabilities of the model-based agent by having

the "goal" information.

 They choose an action, so that they can achieve the goal.

 These agents may have to consider a long sequence of possible actions before

deciding whether the goal is achieved or not.

 Such considerations of different scenario are called searching and planning,

which makes an agent proactive.

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 Utility-based agents
 These agents are similar to the goal-based agent but provide an extra

component of utility measurement which makes them different by

providing a measure of success at a given state.
 Utility-based agent act based not only goals but also the best way to

achieve the goal.

 The Utility-based agent is useful when there are multiple possible

alternatives, and an agent has to choose in order to perform the best

action.
 The utility function maps each state to a real number to check how

efficiently each action achieves the goals.

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 Learning Agents
 A learning agent in AI is the type of agent which can learn from its
past experiences, or it has learning capabilities.
 It starts to act with basic knowledge and then able to act and adapt
automatically through learning.
 A learning agent has mainly four conceptual components, which are:
 Learning element: It is responsible for making improvements by
learning from environment
 Critic: Learning element takes feedback from critic which
describes that how well the agent is doing with respect to a fixed
performance standard.
 Performance element: It is responsible for selecting external
action
 Problem generator: This component is responsible for suggesting
actions that will lead to new and informative experiences.

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 Cont’d

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 Applications of Intelligent Agents
1. Information search, retrieval, and navigation
Intelligent agents enhance access and navigation of information.
This is achieved through the search of information using search
engines.
The internet consists of many data objects that may take users a lot of
time to search for a specific data object.
 Intelligent agents perform this task on behalf of users within a short
time.
2. Repetitive office activities
Some companies have automated certain administrative tasks to
reduce operating costs.
Some of the functional areas that have been automated include
customer support and sales.
 Intelligent agents have also been used to enhance office productivity .
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 Cont’d
3. Medical diagnosis
Intelligent agents have also been applied in healthcare services to

improve the health of patients.

 In this case, the patient is considered as the environment.

The computer keyboard is used as the sensor that receives data

on the symptoms of the patient.

The intelligent agent uses this information to decide the best

course of action.
Medical care is given through actuators such as tests and

39 treatments.
 Cont’d
4. Autonomous driving
Intelligent agents enhance the operation of self-driving cars.

In autonomous driving, various sensors are employed to collect

information from the environment.

 These include cameras, GPS, and radar.

In this application, the environment can be pedestrians, other

vehicles, roads, or road signs. Various actuators are used to initiate

actions.
 For example, brakes are used to bring the car to a stop.
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