Rational agents
l An agent is an entity that perceives and acts
l This course is about designing rational agents
l Abstractly, an agent is a function from percept
histories to actions:
[f: P* A]
l For any given class of environments and tasks,
we seek the agent (or class of agents) with the
best performance
l Caveat: computational limitations make perfect
rationality unachievable
design best program for given machine resources