Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- I Agents in the World: What Are Agents and How Can They Be Built?
- II Representing and Reasoning
- III Learning and Planning
- 7 Learning: Overview and Supervised Learning
- 8 Planning with Certainty
- 9 Planning Under Uncertainty
- 10 Multiagent Systems
- 11 Beyond Supervised Learning
- IV Reasoning About Individuals and Relations
- V The Big Picture
- A Mathematical Preliminaries and Notation
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Planning Under Uncertainty
from III - Learning and Planning
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- I Agents in the World: What Are Agents and How Can They Be Built?
- II Representing and Reasoning
- III Learning and Planning
- 7 Learning: Overview and Supervised Learning
- 8 Planning with Certainty
- 9 Planning Under Uncertainty
- 10 Multiagent Systems
- 11 Beyond Supervised Learning
- IV Reasoning About Individuals and Relations
- V The Big Picture
- A Mathematical Preliminaries and Notation
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
A plan is like the scaffolding around a building. When you're putting up the exterior shell, the scaffolding is vital. But once the shell is in place and you start to work on the interior, the scaffolding disappears. That's how I think of planning. It has to be sufficiently thoughtful and solid to get the work up and standing straight, but it cannot take over as you toil away on the interior guts of a piece. Transforming your ideas rarely goes according to plan.
–Twyla Tharp [2003]In the quote above, Tharp is referring to dance, but the same idea holds for any agent when there is uncertainty. An agent cannot just plan a sequence of steps; the result of planning needs to be more sophisticated. Planning must take into account the fact that the agent does not know what will actually happen when it acts. The agent should plan to react to its environment. What it does is determined by the plan and the actual environment encountered.
Consider what an agent should do when it does not know the exact effects of its actions. Determining what to do is difficult because what an agent should do at any time depends on what it will do in the future. However, what it will do in the future depends on what it does now and what it will observe in the future.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Artificial IntelligenceFoundations of Computational Agents, pp. 371 - 422Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010