"Principles of Intelligent Agents"
"Principles of Intelligent Agents" provides a rigorous and comprehensive exploration of the foundations, architectures, and applications of intelligent agents. Structured around core topics such as agency, rationality, knowledge representation, reasoning, learning, and decision-making, the book adeptly explains the theoretical underpinnings and practical mechanisms that drive the autonomy and adaptability of contemporary agent systems. With clarity and depth, it surveys essential issues including agent architectures, utility theory, perception, world modeling, and the computational limits of intelligent behavior.
Building on this strong theoretical base, the book delves into the engineering and deployment of agents, addressing learning algorithms, planning, multi-agent coordination, and robust decision-making under uncertainty. It emphasizes both the challenges and advances in orchestrating distributed intelligence, robust perception, human-agent interaction, and ethically-aligned autonomy. Coverage extends to the practicalities of software development for agent systems, performance optimization, security, explainability, and the critical societal, legal, and ethical dimensions of deploying autonomous systems in real-world environments.
Key trends and future directions round out the text, highlighting scalable architectures, the growing impact of agents across the IoT and cyber-physical systems, and the quest for artificial general intelligence. Designed for researchers, engineers, and students, "Principles of Intelligent Agents" is both a foundational reference and a forward-looking guide, equipping readers with the intellectual tools and practical insights necessary to innovate in the rapidly evolving field of intelligent agency.