CODEWITHSUNDEEP
searchgraphartificial-intelligenceagent
mrk
mrk

Reputation: 3191

AIMA - Goal formulation

In the book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, ch 3, the first question asks why a problem-solving agent (search) needs to formulate the goal first and then formulate the problem. My guess is that the agent needs to formulate the goal first in order to decide on the level of abstraction of the actions it is going to use in the problem solving process (not in reality). The problem is usually a graph with an initial state and a final state (goal) and the agent must find a sequence of actions that lead to the goal.

Thank you,

Upvotes: 0

Views: 214

Answers (1)

Ian Dickinson
Ian Dickinson

Reputation: 13305

I think you're making it too complicated. If the form of the problem is already given to the agent (as a set of state changing actions that will form the graph), then it needs to know what the goal is (i) to have a decision procedure for "am I done yet?" - i.e. "is the state I've just planned or observed the goal state", and (ii) as a reference point for heuristically-guided search. If, for example, you were using A* you need some way of estimating the distance to the goal for a given search state, so by corollary you need to know what the goal state is first.

Upvotes: 1

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