Artificial Intelligence
Problem Solving Agent
Contents
Problem Solving Agent
Problem Definition
Example Problems
Searching For Solutions
Problem-solving Performance Measure
Search Strategies
Problem Solving Agent
The simplest agents were the reflex agents - base their actions
on a direct mapping from states to actions.
cannot operate well in environments for which this mapping would be
too large to store
Goal-based agents consider future actions and the desirability
of their outcomes
One kind of goal-based agent called a problem-solving agent
Problem-solving agents use atomic representations
states of the world are considered as wholes, with no internal structure
visible
Goal-based agents that use factored or structured
representations are usually called planning agents
Problem Solving Agent
First Step in Problem Solving: Goal formulation
based on the current situation and the agent’s performance
measure
Courses of action that don’t achieve the goal can be rejected without
further consideration
Goals help organize behavior by limiting the objectives
The agent’s task is to find out how to act, now and in the future, so
that it reaches a goal state
Problem formulation is the process of deciding what actions
and states to consider, given a goal.
if the environment is unknown,
an agent with several immediate options of unknown
value can decide what to do by first examining future
actions that eventually lead to states of known value.
Kind of Environment
Observable or partially observable?
Discrete or Continuous?
Deterministic or Stochastic?
Static or Dynamic?
Episodic or Sequential?
Multiple or Single Agent?
Competitive or Cooperative Agent?
Problem Solving Agent
The process of looking for a sequence of actions that reaches
the goal - search.
A search algorithm takes a problem as input and returns a
solution in the form of an action sequence.
Once a solution is found, the actions it recommends can be
carried out - the execution phase.
“formulate, search, execute” design for the agent
Steps:
It first formulates a goal and a problem
searches for a sequence of actions that would solve the problem, and
then executes the actions one at a time.
When this is complete, it formulates another goal and starts over.
Problem Definition
A problem can be defined formally by five components:
Initial state - the agent starts in
Actions
A description of the possible actions available to the agent
Given a particular state s, ACTIONS(s) returns the set of actions that
can be executed in s.
Transition model
A description of what each action does - the transition model
Together, the initial state, actions, and transition model implicitly
define the state space of the problem
state space forms a directed network or graph
Goal test
determines whether a given state is a goal state.
Path cost
function that assigns a numeric cost to each path.
Problem Definition
A solution to a problem is an action sequence that leads from
the initial state to a goal state.
Solution quality is measured by the path cost function, and
an optimal solution has the lowest path cost among all
solutions.
Example Problems - 8-puzzle
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8-puzzle
States: the location of each of the eight tiles and the blank in one of the
nine squares
Initial state: Any state can be designated as the initial state.
Actions: The simplest formulation defines the actions as movements of the
blank space Left, Right, Up, or Down.
Transition model: Given a state and action, this returns the resulting state;
for example, if apply Left to the start state, the resulting state has the 5 and the blank
switched.
Goal test: checks whether the state matches the goal configuration
Path cost: Each step costs 1, so the path cost is the number of steps in the
path
Example Problems - vacuum world
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vacuum world
States: The state is determined by both the agent location and the dirt
locations.
Initial state: Any state can be designated as the initial state.
Actions: each state has just three actions: Left, Right, and Suck.
Transition model: The actions have their expected effects, except that
moving Left in the leftmost square, moving Right in the rightmost
square, and Sucking in a clean square have no effect.
Goal test: This checks whether all the squares are clean.
Path cost: Each step costs 1, so the path cost is the number of steps in
the path.
• 8-queens problem
• route-finding problem
Searching for Solutions
A solution is an action sequence, so search algorithms work
by considering various possible action sequences.
The possible action sequences starting at the initial state
form a search tree with the initial state at the root;
the branches are actions and
the nodes correspond to states in the state space of the problem.
Steps in growing Search tree
root node of the tree corresponds to the initial state
to test whether this is a goal state
expanding the current state - generating a new set of states
The set of all leaf nodes available for expansion at any given point - the frontier
This is the essence of search
Tree-search and Graph-search
Three common variants are the
• first-in, first-out or FIFO queue
• the last-in, first-out or LIFO queue
• the priority queue 14
Performance Measure
Evaluate an algorithm’s performance in four ways
Completeness: Is the algorithm guaranteed to find a solution when
there is one?
Optimality: Does the strategy find the optimal solution?
Time complexity: How long does it take to find a solution?
No. of nodes generated during the search
Space complexity: How much memory is needed to perform the
search?
No. of nodes stored during the search
Complexity is expressed in terms of three quantities:
b, the branching factor or maximum number of successors of any node
d, the depth of the shallowest goal node
m, the maximum length of any path in the state space.
Search Strategies
uninformed search algorithms or blind search
algorithms that are given no information about the problem other than
its definition.
generate successors and distinguish a goal state from a non-goal state
all search strategies are distinguished by the order in which nodes are
expanded
although can solve any solvable problem, not so efficiently.
Breadth-first search, DFS, Uniform-cost search
Informed search algorithms or heuristic search
strategies that know whether one non-goal state is “more promising”
than another
some guidance on where to look for solutions
Greedy best-first search, A* search
The End…
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