Developing Rational Agents

An agent is a system that interacts with an environment continually and without human assistance in order to carry out a predefined task. We are interested in developing artificial agents that act rationally, in the sense that they are able to maximize a suitable utility function. In this chapter, we describe the main problems underlying the realization of rational agents and present commonly adopted mathematical models. In particular, we consider the case in which the environment can be modeled as a finite state stochastic process and address the problem of developing agents that can learn to act rationally through their own experience.