Agent environment

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Agent environment is everything that interacts with an agent. An agent, as every system, has to have an environment. The nature of agent environment depends on the nature of agent, it can be real/physical or abstract.

Every agent environment includes one or more domains of agent activities.

[edit] Agents

A system, in order to be considered agent, such as software agent, hardware agent, cognitive agent or human agent, it has to perceive the environment through sensors and act on the environment through actuators. This must be accomplished autonomously.

Software agents are one of the most prominent and attractive technologies in computer science at the beginning of the new millennium. The technologies, methods, and theories of agents and multiagent systems are currently contributing to many diverse domains such as information retrieval, user interfaces, electronic commerce, robotics, computer mediated collaboration, computer games, education and training, ubiquitous computing, and social simulation. They not only are a very promising technology, but are also emerging as a new way of thinking, a conceptual paradigm for analyzing problems and for designing systems, for dealing with complexity, distribution, and interactivity, while providing a new perspective on computing and intelligence.

A mail transfer agent for example decides when to transfer and deliver the mail, and does so asynchronously and independently from the behaviours of other agents in the system.

Agents generally --and including some software agents-- have the ability to learn and to reason, logically or otherwise. They may discover facts and rules about the world or about others and may assess and argue these truths and may alter their ontology.

[edit] Environments

Environments in which agents operate can be defined in different ways. It is helpful to view the following definitions as referring to the way the environment appears from the point of view of the agent itself.

[edit] Observable & partially observable

In order for an agent to be considered an agent, some part of the environment - relevant to the action being considered - must be observable. In some cases (particularly in software) all of the environment will be observable by the agent. This, while useful to the agent, will generally only be true for relatively simple environments.

[edit] Deterministic, stochastic & strategic

An environment that is fully deterministic is one in which the subsequent state of the environment is wholly dependent on the preceding state and the actions of the agent. If an element of interference or uncertainty occurs then the environment is stochastic. Note that a deterministic yet partially observable environment will appear to be stochastic to the agent.

An environment state wholly determined by the preceding state and the actions of multiple agents is called strategic.

[edit] Episodic & sequential

This refers to the task environment of the agent. If each task that the agent must perform does not rely upon past performance, and will not effect future performance then it is episodic. Otherwise it is sequential.

[edit] Static & dynamic

A static environment, as the name suggests, is one that does not change from one state to the next while the agent is considering its course of action. In other words, the only changes to the environment are those caused by the agent itself. A dynamic environment can change, and if an agent does not respond in a timely manner, this counts as a choice to do nothing.

[edit] Discrete & continuous

This distinction refers to whether or not the environment is composed of a finite or infinite number of possible states. A discrete environment will have a finite number of possible states, however, if this number is extremely high, then it becomes virtually continuous from the agents perspective.

[edit] Single-agent & multiple agent

An environment is only considered multiple agent if the agent under consideration must act cooperatively or competitively with another agent to achieve some task or goal. Otherwise another agent is simply viewed as a stochastically behaving part of the environment.

[edit] Overview of environments

rising order of complexity →
Observable Partially observable
Deterministic Stochastic
Episodic Sequential
Static Dynamic
Discrete Continuous
Single-agent Multiple agent

[edit] See also

[edit] References

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