Intelligent Agents

Agent

Anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon the environment through effectors.

State

At any given moment in time a system can be in one of multiple states

Start State

One of the possible states that the system begins in

Goal State

One or more states which we want the system to be in

Action

At any moment in time it is possible for an agent to execute one action out of a well defined set of actions

Rational agent

Agent that chooses and executes actions to optimally achieve pre-defined goals

Transition model

Describes what each action does, defined by a function taking an action s and a state s and returns the state resulting in performing a in s.

Successor

Refers to any state reachable from a given state by a single action

State space

Set of all states reachable from the start state from any sequence of actions

Path

Sequence of state-action pairs

Path cost function

Function assigning a numeric cost to each path

Solution

Path from the start state to the goal state

Optimal solution

The solution with the lowest path cost

Problem solving steps

1. Figure out how to represent problem as a graph

2. Figure out reasoning with the chosen graph