13 Jan 05
CS 3243 - Lecture 1a
10
Rational agents
lAn agent is an entity that perceives and acts
lThis course is about designing rational agents
lAbstractly, an agent is a function from percept histories to actions:
[f: P* à A]
lFor any given class of environments and tasks, we seek the agent (or class of agents) with the best performance
lCaveat: computational limitations make perfect rationality unachievable
à design best program for given machine
resources