CMSC 71 Fall 2001.ppt

CMSC 671Fall 2001 Class #3/4 – Monday, September 9 / Wednesday, September 11 Today’s class Goal-based agents Representing states and operators Example problems Generic state-space search algorithm Specific algorithms Breadth-first search Depth-first search Uniform cost search Depth-first iterative deepening Example problems revisited Uninformed Search Chapter 3 Building Goal-Based Agents To build a goal-based agent we need to answer the following questions: What is the goal to be achieved? What are the actions? What relevant information is necessary to encode about the world to describe the state of the world, describe the available transitions, and solve the problem? What is the goal to be achieved? Could describe a situation we want to achieve, a set of properties that we want to hold, etc. Requires defining a “goal test” so that we know what it means to have achieved/satisfied our goal. This is a hard question that is rarely tackled in AI, usually assuming that the system designer or user will specify the goal to be achieved. Certainly psychologists and motivational speakers always stress the importance of people establishing clear goals for themselves as the first step towards solving a problem. What are your goals??? What are the actions? Characterize the primitive actions or events that are available for making changes in the world in order to achieve a goal. Deterministic world: no uncertainty in an action’s effects. Given an action (a.k.a. operator or move) and a description of the current world state, the action completely specifies whether that action can be applied to the current world (i.e., is it applicable and legal), and what the exact state of the world will be after the action is performed in the current world (i.e., no need for history information to compute what the new world looks like). Representing actions Note also that actions in this frameworks can all be considered as discrete events that occur at an instant of time. For examp