Chapter 16 – Agents

Contents

16.1  Overview
16.2  Software Agents
16.2.1  The Rise of the Agent
16.2.2  Triggering Actions
16.2.3  Watching and Learning
16.2.4  Searching for Information
16.3  Reinforcement Learning
16.3.1  Single Step Learning
16.3.2  Choices during Learning
16.3.3  Intermittent Rewards and Credit Assignment
16.4  Co-operating Agents and Distributed AI
16.4.1  Blackboard Architectures
16.4.2  Distributed Control
16.5  Larger Collectives
16.5.1  Emergent Behaviour
16.5.2  Cellular Automata
16.5.3  Artificial Life
16.5.4  Swarm Computing
16.5.5  Ensemble Methods
16.6  Summary

Glossary items referenced in this chapter

agents!action, agents!email filtering, agents!embodied, agents!intelligent filtering, agents!machine learning, agents!messages, agents!methods, artificial life, artificial society, Bayesian methods, bibliographic database, bibliographic search, blackboard architecture, boosting, cellular automata, computer chess, concept learning, Conway, John, cooperating agents, cost–benefit, counterfactual reasoning, credit assignment, database, decision tree, deterministic, distributed AI, distributed cognition, EAGER, emergent behaviour, ensemble methods, ensemble methods!heterogeneous, ensemble methods!homogeneous, event, exploration-exploitation trade-off, flocking behaviour, Game of Life, Google, Google alerts, heuristic evaluation function, home automation, Human Computer Interaction, hypertext, IFTTT , image processing, immune system, intermittent rewards, internet of things, knowledge base, local maximum, machine learning, macro languages, Microsoft Clippy, Microsoft Excel, network routing, neural network, NewWave, object-oriented architecture, object-oriented programming, observation–action mapping, obstacle avoidance, optimal route, overfitting, PageRank, Pavlov, Ivan, Pogoing robots, pole balancing, prisoner's dilemma, privacy, programming-by-demonstration, random forest, regret, reinforcement learning, reservoir computing, robotic process automation, robotics, route planning, script, search engine, self-organising map, similarity measure, single step learning, Skinner, B. F., social media, status change event, stemming, strong learner, supervised learning, support vector machine, swarm computing, system event, timed event, trigger, unsupervised learning, user event, user interface agent, weak learners, wisdom of the crowds, wizard, World Wide Web

Prolog examples (from 1st ed.)

blackboard.pblackboard architecture
life.pConways game of Life