(19th-February-2020)
The manipulation of symbols to produce action is called reasoning.
Design time reasoning is the reasoning that is carried out to design the agent. It is carried out by the designer of the agent, not the agent itself.
Offline computation is the computation done by the agent before it has to act. It can include compilation and learning. Offline, the agent takes background knowledge and data and compiles them into a usable form called a knowledge base. Background knowledge can be given either at design time or offline.
Online computation is the computation done by the agent between observing the environment and acting in the environment. A piece of information obtained online is called an observation. An agent typically must use both its knowledge base and its observations to determine what to do.
There are two broad strategies have been pursued in building agents:
The first is to simplify environments and build complex reasoning systems for these simple environments. For example, factory robots can do sophisticated tasks in the engineered environment of a factory, but they may be hopeless in a natural environment. Much of the complexity of the problem can be reduced by simplifying the environment. This is also important for building practical systems because many environments can be engineered to make them simpler for agents.
The second strategy is to build simple agents in natural environments. This is inspired by seeing how insects can survive in complex environments even though they have very limited reasoning abilities. Researchers then make the agents have more reasoning abilities as their tasks become more complicated.
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