(24th-February-2020)
Agents act to have better outcomes for themselves. The only reason to choose one action over another is because the preferred action will lead to more desirable outcomes.
The preference dimension is whether the agent has goals, either achievement goals to be achieved in some final state or maintenance goals that must be maintained in all visited states. For example, the goals for a robot may be to get two cups of coffee and a banana, and not to make a mess or hurt anyone.
Complex preferences involve trade-offs among the desirability of various outcomes, perhaps at different times. An ordinal preference is where only the ordering of the preferences is important. A cardinal preference is where the magnitude of the values matters.
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