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Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents

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Re: Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents

#11

Post by nivertech »

nine_k wrote: post #8
simonw wrote: post #2

Because I collect definitions of "agent", here's the one this book uses: > An agent is something that acts in an environment; it does something. Agents include worms, dogs, thermostats, airplanes, robots, humans, companies, and countries. https://artint.info/3e/html/ArtInt3e.Ch1.S1.html I think of this as the "academic" definition, or sometimes the "thermostat" definition (though maybe I should call it the "worms and…

So basically an agent is a procedure, by this definition: it takes parameters (environment) and acts upon that by executing side effects. An email filter is an agent. A database trigger is an agent.

> it takes parameters (environment)

I think it's better to imagine agent as something that physically placed inside the Environment, and actually modifying/changing/mutating it in place.

> An email filter is an agent. A database trigger is an agent.

you're missing the "I" (Intelligence) part - the filtering logic in the email filter, or a business logic in the DB trigger/stored procedure/CGI script/AWS Lambda function/etc.

But yes, an agent doesn't have to be Intelligent, it can be a Dumb Agent / NPC / Zero-Intelligence Trader.

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents

#12

Post by nextos »

fouc wrote: post #4
simonw wrote: post #2

Because I collect definitions of "agent", here's the one this book uses: > An agent is something that acts in an environment; it does something. Agents include worms, dogs, thermostats, airplanes, robots, humans, companies, and countries. https://artint.info/3e/html/ArtInt3e.Ch1.S1.html I think of this as the "academic" definition, or sometimes the "thermostat" definition (though maybe I should call it the "worms and…

written 2023 , pre-LLM hype

I don't think so. I own the printed version and it starts discussing GPT in page 6 already.

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents

#13

Post by dr_dshiv »

simonw wrote: post #2

Because I collect definitions of "agent", here's the one this book uses: > An agent is something that acts in an environment; it does something. Agents include worms, dogs, thermostats, airplanes, robots, humans, companies, and countries. https://artint.info/3e/html/ArtInt3e.Ch1.S1.html I think of this as the "academic" definition, or sometimes the "thermostat" definition (though maybe I should call it the "worms and…

How are agents different from daemons? And are both essentially cybernetic feedback loops?

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents

#14

Post by jsemrau »

simonw wrote: post #2

Because I collect definitions of "agent", here's the one this book uses: > An agent is something that acts in an environment; it does something. Agents include worms, dogs, thermostats, airplanes, robots, humans, companies, and countries. https://artint.info/3e/html/ArtInt3e.Ch1.S1.html I think of this as the "academic" definition, or sometimes the "thermostat" definition (though maybe I should call it the "worms and…

Add this please ->https://jdsemrau.substack.com/about

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents

#15

Post by light_triad »

Here's a few more definitions of agents:

Agents are a coupling of perception, reasoning, and acting with preferences or goals. They prefer some states of the world to other states, and they act to try to achieve the states they prefer most (this book)

AI agents are rational agents. They make rational decisions based on their perceptions and data to produce optimal performance and results. An AI agent senses its environment with physical or software interfaces (AWS)

An artificial intelligence (AI) agent refers to a system or program that is capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or another system by designing its workflow and utilizing available tools (IBM)

Agents are like layers on top of the language models that observe and collect information, provide input to the model and together generate an action plan and communicate that to the user — or even act on their own, if permitted (Microsoft)

Assumptions:

Focus on rationality vs. goal-seeking vs. autonomy

Whether tool use is emphasized

Architectural specificity

Relationship to users

Decision-making framework (optimality vs. preference satisfaction)

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents

#16

Post by EGreg »

light_triad wrote: post #15

Here's a few more definitions of agents: Agents are a coupling of perception, reasoning, and acting with preferences or goals. They prefer some states of the world to other states, and they act to try to achieve the states they prefer most (this book) AI agents are rational agents. They make rational decisions based on their perceptions and data to produce optimal performance and results. An AI agent senses its envir…

I am really not sure where agents would ever be better than workflows. Can you give me some examples?

Workflows means some organization signed off on what has to be done. Checklists, best practices, etc.

Agents on the other hand have a goal and you have no idea or what they’re going to do to achieve it. I think of an agent’s guardrails as essentially a “blacklist” of actions, while a workflow is a “whitelist”.

To me, agents are a gimmick the same way that real-time chat, or video, is a gimmick. It is good for entertainment but actually has negative value for getting actual work done.

Think of it this way… just as models have a tradeoff between explore and exploit, the agents can be considered as capable of exploration while the workflows exploit best practices. Over time and many tasks, everything is standardized into best practices, so the agents become worse than completely standardized workflows. They may be useful to tinker at the edges but not to make huge decisions. Like maybe agents can be used to set up some personalized hooks for users at the edges of some complex system.

https://medium.com/@falkgottlob/many-ai-agents-are-actually-...

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents

#17

Post by integralof6y »

EGreg wrote: post #16
light_triad wrote: post #15

Here's a few more definitions of agents: Agents are a coupling of perception, reasoning, and acting with preferences or goals. They prefer some states of the world to other states, and they act to try to achieve the states they prefer most (this book) AI agents are rational agents. They make rational decisions based on their perceptions and data to produce optimal performance and results. An AI agent senses its envir…

I am really not sure where agents would ever be better than workflows. Can you give me some examples? Workflows means some organization signed off on what has to be done. Checklists, best practices, etc. Agents on the other hand have a goal and you have no idea or what they’re going to do to achieve it. I think of an agent’s guardrails as essentially a “blacklist” of actions, while a workflow is a “whitelist”. To me,…

Interesting. I understand that you draw the line that separate workflow from agents as the exploitation exploration trade-off. This could allow a dynamic environment in which a parameter depending of each task control the workflow-agent planning. So there is not a clear cut off, the difference depends of the task, the priors, and the posterior experience.

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents

#18

Post by jsemrau »

EGreg wrote: post #16
light_triad wrote: post #15

Here's a few more definitions of agents: Agents are a coupling of perception, reasoning, and acting with preferences or goals. They prefer some states of the world to other states, and they act to try to achieve the states they prefer most (this book) AI agents are rational agents. They make rational decisions based on their perceptions and data to produce optimal performance and results. An AI agent senses its envir…

I am really not sure where agents would ever be better than workflows. Can you give me some examples? Workflows means some organization signed off on what has to be done. Checklists, best practices, etc. Agents on the other hand have a goal and you have no idea or what they’re going to do to achieve it. I think of an agent’s guardrails as essentially a “blacklist” of actions, while a workflow is a “whitelist”. To me,…

"where agents would ever be better than workflows" That is a very important observation and we should avoid to let agents go the way of the blockchain -- you know what I mean.

I have build a narrow AI for credit decisioning on a 100B portfolio between 2012 and 2020. This "agent" can make autonomous credit decisions, if and only if the agent is 100% certain that all inputs are accurate. The value comes from the workflow, not the model.

LLMs change this as there is now a general, I like to call them vanilla models, that does not specifically be trained to the data set. Would I use that in this workflow? Likely not.

(a) it is likely that the narrow model is cheaper to operate than a larger model without seeing a substantial benefit in productivity.

(b) in regulated industries we always need to be able to explain why the AI made a decision. If there is no clear governance framework around operating the agent, then we can't use it. Case in point > "nH predict"

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents

#19

Post by potatoman22 »

jsemrau wrote: post #14
simonw wrote: post #2

Because I collect definitions of "agent", here's the one this book uses: > An agent is something that acts in an environment; it does something. Agents include worms, dogs, thermostats, airplanes, robots, humans, companies, and countries. https://artint.info/3e/html/ArtInt3e.Ch1.S1.html I think of this as the "academic" definition, or sometimes the "thermostat" definition (though maybe I should call it the "worms and…

Add this please -> https://jdsemrau.substack.com/about

To save a click: "We define cognitive autonomous agents as an entity designed to perform tasks autonomously by combining four key components: goals, reasoning/planning, memory, and tools."

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents

#20

Post by jsemrau »

potatoman22 wrote: post #19
jsemrau wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add this please -> https://jdsemrau.substack.com/about

To save a click: "We define cognitive autonomous agents as an entity designed to perform tasks autonomously by combining four key components: goals, reasoning/planning, memory, and tools."

Thank you!
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