Reasoning in intelligent agents
By employing the language of logic, intelligent agents can build robust knowledge bases, enabling sophisticated querying, deductive inference, and reasoning that are not possible with less expressive representational formalisms. Once an intelligent agent has a robust way to represent its knowledge, reasoning mechanisms allow it to intelligently manipulate and make use of that information. Reasoning capabilities enable agents to derive new insights, draw logical conclusions, explain observations, and ultimately make informed decisions to achieve their goals.
Reasoning in intelligent agents is rarely a singular, monolithic process. Sophisticated agent architectures tend to employ a multi-faceted reasoning approach that combines different reasoning styles and data-driven, analytical, and learned components. For instance, a question-answering system could use semantic parsing to map questions to logical forms, apply deductive reasoning over a logical...
