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Commitments in the architecture of a limited, rational agent

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Intelligent Agent Systems Theoretical and Practical Issues (IAS 1996)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1209))

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Abstract

Rationality is a useful metaphor for understanding autonomous, intelligent agents. A persuasive view of intelligent agents uses cognitive primitives such as intentions and beliefs to describe, explain, and specify their behavior. These primitives are often associated with a notion of commitment that is internal to the given agent. However, at first sight, there is a tension between commitments and rationality. We show how the two concepts can be reconciled for the important and interesting case of limited, intelligent agents. We show how our approach extends to handle more subtle issues such as precommitments, which have previously been assumed to be conceptually too complex. We close with a proposal to develop conative policies as a means to represent commitments in a generic, declarative manner.

This paper synthesizes and enhances some ideas that were introduced in papers that appear in the Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (1991) and the Proceedings of the IJCAI-91 Workshop on the Theoretical and Practical Design of Rational Agents.

I am greatly indebted to Lawrence Cavedon for extensive comments.

This work has been partially supported by the NCSU College of Engineering and by the National Science Foundation under grants IRI-9529179 and IRI-9624425.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, 27695-8206, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Munindar P. Singh

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  1. Munindar P. Singh
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Lawrence Cavedon Anand Rao Wayne Wobcke

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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Singh, M.P. (1997). Commitments in the architecture of a limited, rational agent. In: Cavedon, L., Rao, A., Wobcke, W. (eds) Intelligent Agent Systems Theoretical and Practical Issues. IAS 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1209. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62686-7_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62686-7_29

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-62686-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68433-6

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