TY - JOUR
T1 - Modeling agents as qualitative decision makers
AU - Brafman, Ronen I.
AU - Tennenholtz, Moshe
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to Yoav Shoham for importantd iscussionsr egardingt his work, to Joe Halpern for extensivec ommentsa nd suggestionso n previous drafts of this paper,a nd to Craig Boutilier, the anonymous referees,A lvaro de1V al, Bruce Donald, Nir Friedman, and Daphne Koller for their useful comments and suggestionso n earlier versions of this work. We also wish to thank Robert Aumann, David Kreps, and Dov Monderer for helping us put this work in perspective. Parts of this work were conducted while the authors were at Stanford University, partially :supportedb y grants from the National Science Foundations,A dvanced Research Projects .4gency and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
PY - 1997/1/1
Y1 - 1997/1/1
N2 - We investigate the semantic foundations of a method for modeling agents as entities with a mental state which was suggested by McCarthy and by Newell. Our goals are to formalize this modeling approach and its semantics, to understand the theoretical and practical issues that it raises, and to address some of them. In particular, this requires specifying the model's parameters and how these parameters are to be assigned (i.e., their grounding). We propose a basic model in which the agent is viewed as a qualitative decision maker with beliefs, preferences, and a decision strategy; and we show how these components would determine the agent's behavior. We ground this model in the agent's interaction with the world, namely, in its actions. This is done by viewing model construction as a constraint satisfaction problem in which we search for a model consistent with the agent's behavior and with our general background knowledge. In addition, we investigate the conditions under which a mental state model exists, characterizing a class of "goal-seeking" agents that can be modeled in this manner; and we suggest two criteria for choosing between consistent models, showing conditions under which they lead to a unique choice of model.
AB - We investigate the semantic foundations of a method for modeling agents as entities with a mental state which was suggested by McCarthy and by Newell. Our goals are to formalize this modeling approach and its semantics, to understand the theoretical and practical issues that it raises, and to address some of them. In particular, this requires specifying the model's parameters and how these parameters are to be assigned (i.e., their grounding). We propose a basic model in which the agent is viewed as a qualitative decision maker with beliefs, preferences, and a decision strategy; and we show how these components would determine the agent's behavior. We ground this model in the agent's interaction with the world, namely, in its actions. This is done by viewing model construction as a constraint satisfaction problem in which we search for a model consistent with the agent's behavior and with our general background knowledge. In addition, we investigate the conditions under which a mental state model exists, characterizing a class of "goal-seeking" agents that can be modeled in this manner; and we suggest two criteria for choosing between consistent models, showing conditions under which they lead to a unique choice of model.
KW - Agent modeling
KW - Belief ascription
KW - Mental states
KW - Multi-agent systems
KW - Prediction
KW - Qualitative decision making
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0031185898&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/s0004-3702(97)00024-6
DO - 10.1016/s0004-3702(97)00024-6
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0031185898
SN - 0004-3702
VL - 94
SP - 217
EP - 268
JO - Artificial Intelligence
JF - Artificial Intelligence
IS - 1-2
ER -