Towards Anticipatory Agents

This paper presents a novel approach to the problem of designing autonomous agents that is based on the idea of anticipatory systems. An anticipatory system has a model of itself and of the relevant part of its environment and will use this model to predict the future. The predictions are then utilised to determine the agent’s behaviour, i.e. it lets future states affect its present states. We argue that systems based on causal reasoning only, are too limited to serve as a proper base for designing autonomous agents. An anticipatory agent, on the other hand, will use reasoning from final cause to guide its current actions. We then discuss to what extent an anticipatory agent can be constructed from computable functions and we conclude that this problem is best expressed and analysed in linguistic terms. This discussion points out how such an agent should be designed and results in a proposal of an appropriate architecture. However, as the meta-linguistic problems involved are very hard to solve, a simpler architecture is also proposed. This is also a hybrid architecture that synthesizes reactive behaviour and deliberative reasoning, which, we believe, still has its merits compared to previous approaches to the design of autonomous agents. Finally, we discuss introspection and reflection, and show that the underlying concepts are easy to comprehend in the context of anticipatory systems.