The concept of an agent has become important in both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mainstream computer science. Our aim in this paper is to point the reader at what we perceive to be the most important theoretical and practical issues associated with the design and construction of intelligent agents. For convenience, we divide these issues into three areas (though as the reader will see, the divisions are at times somewhat arbitrary). Agent theory is concerned with the question of what an agent is, and the use of mathematical formalisms for representing and reasoning about the properties of agents. Agent architectures can be thought of as software engineering models of agents;researchers in this area are primarily concerned with the problem of designing software or hardware systems that will satisfy the properties specified by agent theorists. Finally, agent languages are software systems for programming and experimenting with agents; these languages may embody principles proposed by theorists. The paper is not intended to serve as a tutorial introduction to all the issues mentioned; we hope instead simply to identify the most important issues, and point to work that elaborates on them. The article includes a short review of current and potential applications of agent technology.

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Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice

Evolutionary psychology is one of many biologically informed approaches to the study of human behavior. Along with cognitive psychologists, evolutionary psychologists propose that much, if not all, of our behavior can be explained by appeal to internal psychological mechanisms. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations—products of natural selection—that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive and reproduce. To understand the central claims of evolutionary psychology we require an understanding of some key concepts in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Philosophers are interested in evolutionary psychology for a number of reasons. For philosophers of science —mostly philosophers of biology—evolutionary psychology provides a critical target. There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise. For philosophers of mind and cognitive science evolutionary psychology has been a source of empirical hypotheses about cognitive architecture and specific components of that architecture. Philosophers of mind are also critical of evolutionary psychology but their criticisms are not as all-encompassing as those presented by philosophers of biology. Evolutionary psychology is also invoked by philosophers interested in moral psychology both as a source of empirical hypotheses and as a critical target.

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

A computer program capable of acting intelligently in the world must have a general representation of the world in terms of which its inputs are interpreted. Designing such a program requires commitments about what knowledge is and how it is obtained. Thus, some of the major traditional problems of philosophy arise in artificial intelligence. More specifically, we want a computer program that decides what to do by inferring in a formal language that a certain strategy will achieve its assigned goal. This requires formalizing concepts of causality, ability, and knowledge. Such formalisms are also considered in philosophical logic. The first part of the paper begins with a philosophical point of view that seems to arise naturally once we take seriously the idea of actually making an intelligent machine. We go on to the notions of metaphysically and epistemo-logically adequate representations of the world and then to an explanation of can, causes, and knows in terms of a representation of the world by a system of interacting automata. A proposed resolution of the problem of freewill in a deterministic universe and of counterfactual conditional sentences is presented. The second part is mainly concerned with formalisms within which it can be proved that a strategy will achieve a goal. Concepts of situation, fluent, future operator, action, strategy, result of a strategy and knowledge are formalized. A method is given of constructing a sentence of first-order logic which will be true in all models of certain axioms if and only if a certain strategy will achieve a certain goal. The formalism of this paper represents an advance over McCarthy (1963) and Green (1969) in that it permits proof of the correctness of strategies that contain loops and strategies that involve the acquisition of knowledge; and it is also somewhat more concise. The third part discusses open problems in extending the formalism of part 2. The fourth part is a review of work in philosophical logic in relation to problems of artificial intelligence and a discussion of previous efforts to program ‘general intelligence’ from the point of view of this paper.

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Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence

From the Publisher:
An agent is an entity with domain knowledge, goals and actions. Multi-agent systems are a set of agents which
interact in a common environment. Multi-agent systems deal with the construction of complex systems involving multiple agents and their coordination. A multi-agent system (MAS) is a distributed computing system with
autonomous interacting intelligent agents that coordinate their actions so as to achieve its goal(s) jointly or competitively.

Introduction to Multiagent Systems

The task of quantizing general relativity raises serious questions about the meaning of the present formulation and interpretation of quantum mechanics when applied to so fundamental a structure as the space-time geometry itself. This paper seeks to clarify the foundations of quantum mechanics. It presents a reformulation of quantum theory in a form believed suitable for application to general relativity. The aim is not to deny or contradict the conventional formulation of quantum theory, which has demonstrated its usefulness in an overwhelming variety of problems, but rather to supply a new, more general and complete formulation, from which the conventional interpretation can be deduced. The relationship of this new formulation to the older formulation is therefore that of a metatheory to a theory, that is, it is an underlying theory in which the nature and consistency, as well as the realm of applicability, of the older theory can be investigated and clarified.

"relative State" Formulation of Quantum Mechanics

It is argued that a sophisticated question-answering machine that has the capability of making inferences from its data base should employ a certain four-valued logic, the motivating consideration being that minor inconsistencies in its data should not be allowed to lead (as in classical logic) to irrelevant conclusions. The actual form of the four-valued logic is ‘deduced’ from an interplay of this motivating consideration with certain ideas of Dana Scott concerning ‘approximation lattices.’

A Useful Four-Valued Logic

The Description for this book, Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity Vol I, will be forthcoming

Entailment : the logic of relevance and necessity

In this elucidating work, the authors attempt to construct a logical analysis of human actions, focusing on those actions based on choice. Using their examination of "seeing to it that," they investigate a large number of topics, including imperatives, deontic logic, strategies, determinism, and promising assertion. One of the work's provocative conclusions is that one, actual future does not exist; instead, all possible futures are on par with one another.

Facing the Future: Agents and Choices in Our Indeterminist World

In this rigorous investigation into the logic of truth Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap explain how the concept of truth works in both ordinary and pathological contexts. The latter include, for instance, contexts that generate Liar Paradox. Their central claim is that truth is a circular concept. In support of this claim they provide a widely applicable theory (the "revision theory") of circular concepts. Under the revision theory, when truth is seen as circular both its ordinary features and its pathological features fall into a simple understandable pattern. The Revision Theory of Truth is unique in placing truth in the context of a general theory of definitions. This theory makes sense of arbitrary systems of mutually interdependent concepts, of which circular concepts, such as truth, are but a special case.

The Revision Theory of Truth

I propose that a certain four-valued logic should sometimes be used. It is to be understood that I use “logic” in a narrow sense, the old sense: a logic as an organon, a tool, a canon of inference. And it is also to be understood that I use “should” in a straightforward normative sense.

Nuel D. Belnap

Papers

A Useful Four-Valued Logic

Entailment : the logic of relevance and necessity

Facing the Future: Agents and Choices in Our Indeterminist World

The Revision Theory of Truth

How a Computer Should Think