CMSC 477/677 - Spring 2007
Discussion Questions for Class #2, February 1
Reading: Wooldridge and Jennings, "Intelligent Agents..."
- 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?