CMSC 477/677 - Spring 2007

Discussion Questions for Class #2, February 1

• Intentionality and belief
• What is the intentional stance? What are pro-attitudes?
• Why is belief reasoning not truth functional? What is referential opacity? What are modal operators? What are possible worlds semantics? Does it seem practical to you to implement an agent using possible-worlds modal logic?
• Persistent goals and intentions are useful for reasoning about agents' plans in dynamic environments, in contrast to traditional planning, where the planning process is essentially static.  What's the difference between a persistent goal in Cohen and Levesque's intention theory and a plain old goal in planning?  What's the difference between a persistent goal and an intention?
• Communication
• What's speech act theory?
• Why do you think agent communication languages might be useful? What do you think the limitations of an ACL such as KQML might be?
• Architectures
• Wooldridge distinguishes between deliberative architectures (based on planning and theorem proving), reactive architectures (based on "non-symbolic" reasoning methods), and hybrid architectures (which have a bit of each). Another breakdown one might consider would include cognitive architectures, logical architectures, and reactive architectures. Any guesses about how these categorizations might relate to each other?
• Agent languages
• Agent languages (high-level languages, ontologies, and tools for building agent-based applications) are becoming popular in the agent R&D community. Some have proposed that XML is a good solution for agent communication. Do you agree? Why or why not?
• Applications
• One topic we're not specifically covering is "believable agents," which are quite in vogue (especially among those who are into computer gaming and want realistic artificial agents in their gaming environments). I might try to squeeze in a paper or two on this topic during the class on Emotion. What do you think?