Day 20 - Acting Rationally: The rational agent approach - Artificial Intelligence - IT Consultant - SAP, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

We have seen in detail “Thinking Humanly: The cognitive modeling approach”, “Acting Humanly: The Touring Test approach”, and “Thinking Rationally: The law of thoughts approach” in previous posts.

We also did an in-depth analysis of how to make an AI model think and act like a human.

It helped us to look deeper into the Four Main Approaches to Artificial Intelligence.

In this article, we will take a closer look at “Acting Rationally: The rational agent approach”.

A traditional computer program blindly executes the code that we write. Neither it acts on its own nor it adapts to change itself based on the outcome.

The so-called agent program that we refer to here is expected to do more than the traditional computer program. It is expected to create and pursue the goal, change state, and operate autonomously.

A rational agent is an agent that acts to achieve its best performance for a given task.

The “Logical Approach” to AI emphasizes correct inferences and achieving a correct inference is a part of the rational agent. Being able to give a logical reason is one way of acting rationally. But all correct inferences cannot be called rationality, because there are situations that don’t always have a correct thing to do. It is also possible to act rationally without involving inferences. Our reflex actions are considered as best examples of acting rationally without inferences.

The rational agent approach to AI has a couple of advantage over other approaches:

A correct inference is considered a possible way to achieve rationality but is not always required to achieve rationality.
It is a more manageable scientific approach to define rationality than others that are based on human behavior or human thought.

Today’s AI concentrates on developing general principles of rational agents rather than achieving perfect rational agents due to complex environments.

However, with the recent developments in supercomputing, 5G, other infrastructures, etc., the superintelligence rational agents are available and increasing now.