[mod.ai] Seminar - The Architecture of a Rational Agent

gideon%edai.edinburgh.ac.uk@CS.UCL.AC.UK (Gideon Sahar) (02/18/86)

From: Gideon Sahar <gideon%edai.edinburgh.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk>


EDINBURGH AI SEMINARS

Date:     Wednesday, 19th February l9986

Time:     2.00 p.m.

Place:    Department of Artificial Intelligence
          Seminar Room
	  Forrest Hill
	  EDINBURGH.

Dr. Robert C. Moore, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
(visiting from SRI International) will give a seminar entitled -
"The Architecture of a Rational Agent".


The ultimate goal of artificial intelligence is to build complete,
autonomous, artificial rational agents.   Most research in AI focuses
on one or another component of such an agent:  the vision sybsystem,
reasoning subsystem, language subsystem, etc.   Recently, however, some
attention has begun to be paid to the over-all architecture in which
these subsystems are combined.   The first half of this talk will
discuss how concern for the architecture of rational agents is motivated
by the need to treat language as a form of rational action, and how
this view of language provides a formal framework for treating phenomena
that have been argued to be beyond the scope of formal analysis.   In
the second half of the talk, we will compare the three component
belief/desire/intention model of rational agency typically used in AI
to the two component model cannot satisfactorily account for
cooperation among rational agents, proving a theorem to the effect that
there are situations in which there is no strategy for a group of
two-component agents that is rational by the normal standards of
decision theory.