Intelligent Agent Design Issues: Internal Agent State and Incomplete Perception

Given the present diversity of architectures for intelligent agents it is important that we start identifying those environmental characteristics that impact architecture design. This would benefit architecture designers and those trying to understand and evaluate existing architectures. Unfortunately. the “Turing Tarpit” discourages precise characterizations. Nonetheless, we attempt here to make a precise characterization. We explore the situation where immediate perception of all pertinent aspects of the world is incomplete. Under this ubiquitous condition, we claim that internal state is necessary to compensate for sensory limitations. We identify types of internal state and examine the relationship between the characteristics of the environment and the appropriateness of each type of internal state for an agent.