Agents Situated in Environments

(15th-February-2020)

• AI is about practical reasoning: reasoning in order to do something. A coupling of perception, reasoning, and acting comprises an agent. An agent acts in an environment. An agent's environment may well include other agents. An agent together with its environment is called a world.

• An agent could be, for example, a coupling of a computational engine with physical sensors and actuators, called a robot, where the environment is a physical setting. It could be the coupling of an advice-giving computer--an expert system--with a human who provides perceptual information and carries out the task.

• An agent could be a program that acts in a purely computational environment--a software agent.

An agent interacting with an environment