Thursday 21 June 2007

24.2, An Introduction to Multiagent Systems

Notes taken from 'An Introduction to Multiagent Systems' (2002), by Michael Wooldridge

2, Intelligent Agents

An agent is a computer system that is situated in some environment, and that is capable of autonomous action in this environment in order to meet its design objectives.

Environments: Russell and Norvig (1995) suggest the following classification of environment properties:

- Accessible versus inaccessible...
- Deterministic versus non-deterministic...
- Static versus dynamic...
- Discrete versus continuous...

Intelligent Agents: The following list of the kinds of capabilities that we might expect an intelligent agent to have was suggested by Wooldridge and Jennings (1995):

- Reactivity...
- Proactiveness...
- Social ability...

... What turns out to be hard is building a system that achieves an effective balance between goal-directed and reactive behaviour.

(Agents and Objects, Agents and Expert Systems, Agents as Intentional Systems, Abstract Architectures for Intelligent Agents, How to Tell an Agent What to Do, Synthesizing Agents)

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