Agents
An agent is an animate entity that is capable of doing something on purpose. That definition is broad enough to include humans and other animals, the subjects of verbs that express actions, and the computerized robots and softbots. But it depends on other words whose meanings are just as problematical: animate, capable, doing, andpurpose. The task of defining those words raises questions that involve almost every other aspect of ontology.
- Animate. Literally, an animate entity is one that has an anima or soul. But anima is the Latin translation of Aristotle's word psychê, which had a much broader meaning than the English word soul. Aristotle defined a hierarchy ranging from a vegetative psyche for plants to a rational psyche for humans. The first question is whether Aristotle's hierarchy of psyches can accommodate the modern robots and softbots.
- Capable. The agent of a verb plays that role only as long as the action persists, but an entity can also be considered an agent if it has the power to perform some action whether or not it actually does. Formalizing that notion of power raises questions about modality, potentiality, dispositions, and counterfactuals that have been discussed in philosophy for centuries.
- Doing. The verb do sounds as simple as two other little verbs be and have. But like those verbs, its dictionary entry has one of the largest number of senses of any word in the English language. A common feature of all those senses is causality and purpose: some agent for some purpose causes some process to occur. This feature not only creates a cyclic dependency of doing on agent, it also introduces the notions of causality, process, and occurrence.
- Purpose. In the top-level ontology, purpose is defined as an intention of some agent that determines the interaction of entities in a situation. That is consistent with the definition of an agent as an entity that does something on purpose, but the circularity makes it impossible to give a closed-form definition of either term.
Psychology of Agents
Linguistically, an agent is an animate being that can perform some action, and an action is an event that is initiated or carried out by some animate being. The circularity in those definitions can be broken by determining what characteristics of an animate being are necessary for it to play the role of an agent. Then those features can be generalized to a definition of agent that applies to people, animals, robots, and certain kinds of computer programs.
The word animate comes from the Latin anima, which means breath or soul. The medieval Scholastics used anima as a translation of the Greek psychê, which also means breath or soul. The basis for the modern terminology is Aristotle's treatise Peri Psychês, which is called De Anima in Latin or On the Soul in English. Aristotle defined the psyche as the logos or principle that determines what it is for something to be a living entity. Instead of a single principle of the psyche that covered all living things, Aristotle found six related functions, which he arranged in a hierarchy: nutrition, perception, desire, locomotion, imagery, and thought:
We must inquire for each kind of living thing, what is its psyche; what is that of a plant, and what is that of a human or a beast. The reason why the functions are arranged in this order must also be considered. For without nutrition, there does not exist perception, but in plants, nutrition is found without perception. Again, without the sense of touch none of the other senses exists, but touch exists without the others, for many animals have neither vision nor hearing nor sense of smell. And of those that can perceive, some have locomotion, while others have not. Finally and most rarely, they have reason and thought. Those mortal creatures that have reason have all the rest, but not all those that have each of the others have reason; some do not even have imagery, but others live by this alone. The rational intellect requires a separate principle ( logos). An appropriate definition of each of these functions would be the most appropriate for the psyche as well. [414b32]Aristotle's hierarchy of functions was based on his extensive study of the plants and animals known in his day. With his criteria, he was the first to recognize that sponges were primitive animals rather than plants. The subdivisions in the tree of Porphyry (Figure 1.1 in the book Knowledge Representation ), are based on Aristotle's distinctions of animate/inanimate, sensitive/insensitive, and rational/irrational.
Competence Levels
Aristotle's hierarchy resembles the competence levels that Rodney Brooks (1986) defined for mobile robots. A robot is an AI system that receives signals from the environment and acts on the environment in a way that helps it to achieve some preestablished goals. In what he called the subsumption architecture for mobile robots, Brooks distinguished eight levels of competence, each with increasingly more sophisticated goals and means for achieving them:
- Avoiding. Avoid contact with other objects, either moving or stationary.
- Wandering. Wander around aimlessly without hitting things.
- Exploring. Look for places in the world that seem reachable and head for them.
- Mapping. Build a map of the environment and record the routes from one place to another.
- Noticing. Recognize changes in the environment that require updates to the mental maps.
- Reasoning. Identify objects, reason about them, and perform actions on them.
- Planning. Formulate and execute plans that involve changing the environment in some desirable way.
- Anticipating. Reason about the behavior of other objects, anticipate their actions, and modify plans accordingly.
The behavior of the lower levels depends primarily on immediate inputs. The higher levels depend more heavily on internal representations, such as maps of the environment, memories of previous inputs, stored patterns for recognizing familiar objects, and established habits for repeatable behaviors. Every level responds to signs from the external environment and from other internal levels, but there is an increase in complexity from the automatic responses at the lower levels to the knowledge-based reasoning at the higher levels.
Artificial Psyches
Aristotle's levels may help to clarify and refine the competence levels. Nutrition, which Brooks omitted, is necessary for a robot to recharge its batteries; and desire or something like it is necessary to determine goals for the robot at every level, from the most primitive nutrition to the most sophisticated planning.
What distinguishes a software agent from an ordinary program is a unifying principle that gives it a certain autonomy. Following Aristotle, that principle may be called its psyche, and its definition can be based on an appropriate definition of each of its functions. The six functions of the psyche, which Aristotle applied to living things from plants and insects to humans, can serve as metaphors for the functions of artificial agents:
- Nutrition. For a robot or embodied agent, nutrition is the act of recharging its batteries or energy stores from time to time. For a software agent, nutrition is the procurement of computer time and storage space from a host system. A computer virus is a parasite that steals the time and space; a more benign agent lives in a symbiotic relationship with its host, providing useful services in exchange for room and board.
- Perception. For a robot, perception depends on input sensors and the ability to interpret the inputs. A television camera, for example, may provide a stream of data; to see, however, the robot must convert the data to a representation of objects in the environment. For a software agent, perception requires access to input devices of the host and the ability to interpret data from those devices.
- Desire. Aristotle's general word for desire is orexis, which causes an agent to reach for what is desired -- one that doesn't reach is anorexic. He distinguished three aspects of desire: appetite (epithymia), passion (thymos), and will (boulêsis). He classified appetite and passion as feelings shared with beasts and will as the result of rational thought. In their psychology of agents, Moffat and Frijda (1995) made a similar distinction between preference and will. For a software agent, the built-in equivalent of appetite or passion gives it a preference for certain kinds of states. Its will is determined by a logically derived plan for reaching a preferred state.
- Locomotion. For mobile robots, locomotion is a basic function that may be further divided into subfunctions, such as Brooks's competence levels. Software agents, which operate in some host system, may use the input/output devices of the host to explore the environment, including anything reachable via computer networks.
- Imagery. Aristotle's term phantasia, according to the Liddell and Scott dictionary, means the appearance, presentation, or representation of images "whether immediate or in memory, whether true or illusory." The processing of imagery by computer is an active research topic in artificial intelligence. Like Aristotle, many researchers believe that important aspects of animal-level intelligence can be achieved by manipulating imagelike data structures rather than propositions (Glasgow et al. 1995).
- Thought. Aristotle reserved the highest level of the psyche for rational thought. His term for rational animal was zôon logon echon (animal having logos). For software agents, rational thought corresponds to the deductive and planning capacity that transforms the motivating forces of appetite and passion into will. A rational agent must be able to perceive relevant aspects of a situation, evaluate their desirability, and determine plans for transforming the current situation into a more desirable one.
For further discussion about continuous processes, discrete processes, and causal influences, see the paper on Processes and Causality.
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