Knowledge-Based Agents

One would think that having knowlege increases your chances of success. And survival.

Motivation

Pure reflex agents aren't efficient enough in most situations, nor are they very smart, nor are they frequently successful. Good agents need knowledge about their environment.

Knowledge is crucial in

Basics

Areas of study

Roughly three main areas

Each of these areas are huge, and they overlap a lot.

Knowledge Representation

KR is a huge field. You study ontology, categories, objects, composition, aggregation, inheritance, actions, situations, events, states, time (tenses, intervals), belief, processes, relationships, fluents, possible worlds, modalities, etc.

Natural language is a poor representation language — highly ambiguous, full of elided context, problematic pronouns, etc. It relies on a massive preexisting knowledge base of commonsense information anyway.

Many formal languages have been invented for KR, and you can invent your own.

Reasoning

Generally agents make inferences using their knowledge bases according to either or both of

Learning

Learning is adding to a knowledge base facts gleaned from new percepts (and their interaction with existing knowledge).