What is an Agent?

An agent can be anything that perceive

its environment through sensors and act upon that environment
through actuators. An Agent runs in the cycle
of perceiving, thinking, and acting. An agent can be:
o Human-Agent: A human agent has eyes, ears, and other
organs which work for sensors and hand, legs, vocal tract
work for actuators.
o Robotic Agent: A robotic agent can have cameras,
infrared range finder, NLP for sensors and various motors
for actuators.
o Software Agent: Software agent can have keystrokes, file
contents as sensory input and act on those inputs and
display output on the screen.
Hence the world around us is full of agents such as thermostat,
cellphone, camera, and even we are also agents.
Sensor: Sensor is a device which detects the change in the
environment and sends the information to other electronic
devices. An agent observes its environment through sensors.
Actuators: Actuators are the component of machines that
converts energy into motion. The actuators are only
responsible for moving and controlling a system. An actuator
can be an electric motor, gears, rails, etc.
Effectors: Effectors are the devices which affect the
environment. Effectors can be legs, wheels, arms, fingers,
wings, fins, and display screen.

Intelligent Agents:
An intelligent agent is an autonomous entity which act upon
an environment using sensors and actuators for achieving
goals. An intelligent agent may learn from the environment to
achieve their goals. A thermostat is an example of an
intelligent agent.
Following are the main four rules for an AI agent:
o Rule 1: An AI agent must have the ability to perceive the
environment.
o Rule 2: The observation must be used to make decisions.
o Rule 3: Decision should result in an action.
o Rule 4: The action taken by an AI agent must be a rational
action.
Rational Agent:
A rational agent is an agent which has clear preference,
models uncertainty, and acts in a way to maximize its
performance measure with all possible actions.
A rational agent is said to perform the right things. AI is about
creating rational agents to use for game theory and decision
theory for various real-world scenarios.
For an AI agent, the rational action is most important because
in AI reinforcement learning algorithm, for each best possible
action, agent gets the positive reward and for each wrong
action, an agent gets a negative reward.
Note: Rational agents in AI are very similar to intelligent
agents.
Rationality:
The rationality of an agent is measured by its performance
measure. Rationality can be judged on the basis of following
points:
o Performance measure which defines the success criterion.
o Agent prior knowledge of its environment.
o Best possible actions that an agent can perform.
o The sequence of percepts.
Note: Rationality differs from Omniscience because an
Omniscient agent knows the actual outcome of its action and
act accordingly, which is not possible in reality.
Structure of an AI Agent
 The task of AI is to design an agent program which
implements the agent function. The structure of an intelligent
agent is a combination of architecture and agent program. It
can be viewed as:
1. Agent = Architecture + Agent program
Following are the main three terms involved in the structure
of an AI agent:
Architecture: Architecture is machinery that an AI agent
executes on.
Agent Function: Agent function is used to map a percept to an
action.

Types of AI Agents
Agents can be grouped into five classes based on their degree
of perceived intelligence and capability. All these agents can
improve their performance and generate better action over the
time. These are given below:

o Simple Reflex Agent

o Model-based reflex agent
o Goal-based agents
o Utility-based agent
o Learning agent
1. Simple Reflex agent:
o The Simple reflex agents are the simplest agents. These
agents take decisions on the basis of the current percepts
and ignore the rest of the percept history.
o These agents only succeed in the fully observable
environment.
o The Simple reflex agent does not consider any part of
percepts history during their decision and action process.
o The Simple reflex agent works on Condition-action rule,
which means it maps the current state to action. Such as a
Room Cleaner agent, it works only if there is dirt in the
room.
o Problems for the simple reflex agent design approach:
o They have very limited intelligence

o They do not have knowledge of non-perceptual parts

of the current state

o Mostly too big to generate and to store.

o Not adaptive to changes in the environment.

2. Model-based reflex agent
o The Model-based agent can work in a partially observable
environment, and track the situation.
o A model-based agent has two important factors:
o Model: It is knowledge about "how things happen in

the world," so it is called a Model-based agent.

o Internal State: It is a representation of the current

state based on percept history.

o These agents have the model, "which is knowledge of the
world" and based on the model they perform actions.
o Updating the agent state requires information about:
a. How the world evolves
b. How the agent's action affects the world.
3. Goal-based agents
o The knowledge of the current state environment is not
always sufficient to decide for an agent to what to do.
o The agent needs to know its goal which describes
desirable situations.
o Goal-based agents expand the capabilities of the model-
based agent by having the "goal" information.
o They choose an action, so that they can achieve the goal.
o These agents may have to consider a long sequence of
possible actions before deciding whether the goal is
achieved or not. Such considerations of different scenario
are called searching and planning, which makes an agent
proactive.
4. Utility-based agents
o These agents are similar to the goal-based agent but
provide an extra component of utility measurement which
makes them different by providing a measure of success
at a given state.
o Utility-based agent act based not only goals but also the
best way to achieve the goal.
o The Utility-based agent is useful when there are multiple
possible alternatives, and an agent has to choose in order
to perform the best action.
o The utility function maps each state to a real number to
check how efficiently each action achieves the goals.
5. Learning Agents
o A learning agent in AI is the type of agent which can learn
from its past experiences, or it has learning capabilities.
o It starts to act with basic knowledge and then able to act
and adapt automatically through learning.
o A learning agent has mainly four conceptual components,
which are:
a. Learning element: It is responsible for making
improvements by learning from environment
b. Critic: Learning element takes feedback from critic
which describes that how well the agent is doing with
respect to a fixed performance standard.
c. Performance element: It is responsible for selecting
external action
 d. Problem generator: This component is responsible
for suggesting actions that will lead to new and
informative experiences.
o Hence, learning agents are able to learn, analyze
performance, and look for new ways to improve the
performance.