Introduction to AI

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What is AI?

Nowadays, AI means designing a rational agent, which could act rationlly to choose the action that maximizes its expected utility.

Agent

An agent is an entity that perceives and acts. A rational agent selects actions that maximize its expected utility. Characteristics of the percepts, environment, and action space dictate techniques for selecting rational actions.

An agent needs sensors to sense the information of the environment, and also needs actuators to take actions based on perceived information.

Goal

This and following articles are about general AI techniques for a variety of problem types and learning to recognize when and how a new problem can be solved with an existing technique.

The following articles will cover AI in two parts:

• Part I: Making Decisions
  • Uninformed and Informed Search
  • Constraint Satisfaction Problem
  • Adversarial and Uncertain Search

• Part II: Reasoning under Uncertainty
  • Markov Decision Problem
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Markov Model & Hidden Markov Model