Agents and Their Environments

The world itself is a very complex place for architecture agents to act in. The real world is partially observable, stochastic, sequential, dynamic and continuous. Most architecture is designed to only deal with fractions of the total possible environmental complexity by acting in particular domains. For example, some architecture assumes that the world is static and that the only things that change in the world are via an agent's actions. Other architectures may operate in dynamic environments but require that world be consistent or predictable. Some require a limited number of clearly defined percepts and actions. In some cases the experience is divided in to atomic “episodes “ and the choice of action in each episode depends only on episode itself .The links below briefly describe and define some of the possible environmental considerations made when developing cognitive architectures, mostly without direct reference to specific architectures.