[Discussion Topic--must comment] Optimality ; prior knowledge; discounted rewards; Environment vs. Agent complexity..

["Subbarao Kambhampati" <rao@asu.edu>]

[[Folks:
 By now you all had enough time to get yourself signed up to the class blog. As I said, participation is "required" in this class. Participation involves
doing assigned readings, asking questions (as needed) in the class and most importantly, taking part in the class blog discussions. Here is the first discussion topic
for your edification. 

As for the quanity vs. quality of your comments, I suggest you go by the Woody Allen quote below for guidance.. ;-)]]


Here are some of the things that I would like to see discussion/comments from the class

1. Optimality--given that most "human agents" are anything but provably optimal, does it make sense for us to focus on optimality of our agent algorithms? Also, if you have more than one optimality objective (
e.g., cost of travel and time of travel), what should be the goal of an algorithm that aims to get "optimal" solutions? 

2. Prior Knowledge--does it make sense to consider agent architectures where prior knowledge and representing and reasoning with it play such central roles? Also, is it easy to compare the "amount" of knowledge that different agents start with?

3. Environment vs. Agent complexity--One big issue in agent design is that an agent may have very strong limitations on its memory and computational resources. A desirable property of an agent architecture should be that we can instantiate it for any <agent, enviornment> pair, no matter how complex the enviornment and how simplistic the agent. Comment on whether or not whether or not this property holds for the architectures we saw. Also, check out "Simon's Ant" on the web and see why it is related to this question. 

4. Learning--In the class, we said that an agent can learn (and improve) its knowledge about how the world evolves and how its actions affect the world etc. One thing that was not clarified is whether "utilities" are learned or given/hard-wired. Any comments (using your knowledge of humans)? 

5. Anything else from the first three classes that you want to hold-forth on. 

Rao


----------------

"The question is have I learned anything about life. Only that human
being are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the nobler
aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, but the body has all the fun.
The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter... if it turns out
that there IS a God, I don't think that He's evil. I think that the
worst you can say about Him is that basically He's an underachiever.
After all, there are worse things in life than death. If you've ever
spent an evening with an insurance salesman, you know what I'm talking
about. The key is, to not think of death as an end, but as more of a
very effective way to cut down on your expenses. Regarding love, heh,
what can you say? It's not the quantity of your sexual relations that
counts. It's the quality. On the other hand if the quantity drops below
once every eight months, I would definitely look into it. Well, that's
about it for me folks. Goodbye.
"
                ---Boris in Love & Death (1975 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0073312/ )