An AI system is composed of an agent and its environment. The agents act in their environment.

The environment
may contain other agents.

What are Agent and Environment?

An agent is anything that can perceive its environment through sensors and acts upon that environment
through effectors.
 A human agent has sensory organs such as eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin parallel to the sensors, and
other organs such as hands, legs, mouth, for effectors.
 A robotic agent replaces cameras and infrared range finders for the sensors, and various motors and
actuators for effectors.
 A software agent has encoded bit strings as its programs and actions.

Agent Terminology
 Performance Measure of Agent − It is the criteria, which determines how successful an agent is.
 Behavior of Agent − It is the action that agent performs after any given sequence of percepts.
 Percept − It is agent’s perceptual inputs at a given instance.
 Percept Sequence − It is the history of all that an agent has perceived till date.
 Agent Function − It is a map from the precept sequence to an action.

The Structure of Intelligent Agents

Agent’s structure can be viewed as −

 Agent = Architecture + Agent Program

 Architecture = the machinery that an agent executes on.
 Agent Program = an implementation of an agent function.

Simple Reflex Agents

 They choose actions only based on the current percept.

  They are rational only if a correct decision is made only on the basis of current precept.
 Their environment is completely observable.
 Condition-Action Rule − It is a rule that maps a state (condition) to an action.

Model Based Reflex Agents

They use a model of the world to choose their actions. They maintain an internal state.
Model − knowledge about “how the things happen in the world”.
Internal State − It is a representation of unobserved aspects of current state depending on percept history.
Updating the state requires the information about −

 How the world evolves.

 How the agent’s actions affect the world.

Goal Based Agents

They choose their actions in order to achieve goals. Goal-based approach is more flexible than reflex agent since
the knowledge supporting a decision is explicitly modeled, thereby allowing for modifications.
Goal − It is the description of desirable situations.
Utility Based Agents
They choose actions based on a preference (utility) for each state.
Goals are inadequate when −
 There are conflicting goals, out of which only few can be achieved.
 Goals have some uncertainty of being achieved and you need to weigh likelihood of success against the
importance of a goal.

Search Algorithm Terminologies:

o Search: Searching is a step by step procedure to solve a search-problem in a given search
space. A search problem can have three main factors:
 a. Search Space: Search space represents a set of possible solutions, which a system
may have.

b. Start State: It is a state from where agent begins the search.

c. Goal test: It is a function which observe the current state and returns whether the
goal state is achieved or not.

Search tree: A tree representation of search problem is called Search tree. The root of the
search tree is the root node which is corresponding to the initial state.

Actions: It gives the description of all the available actions to the agent.

Transition model: A description of what each action do, can be represented as a transition
model.

Path Cost: It is a function which assigns a numeric cost to each path.

Solution: It is an action sequence which leads from the start node to the goal node.

Optimal Solution: If a solution has the lowest cost among all solutions.

Properties of Search Algorithms:

Completeness: A search algorithm is said to be complete if it guarantees to return a solution if at
least any solution exists for any random input.

Optimality: If a solution found for an algorithm is guaranteed to be the best solution (lowest path
cost) among all other solutions, then such a solution for is said to be an optimal solution.

Time Complexity: Time complexity is a measure of time for an algorithm to complete its task.

Space Complexity: It is the maximum storage space required at any point during the search, as the
complexity of the problem.

Types of search algorithms

Based on the search problems we can classify the search algorithms into uninformed (Blind
search) search and informed search (Heuristic search) algorithms.
Uninformed/Blind Search
Uninformed search is a class of general-purpose search algorithms which operates in brute
force-way. Uninformed search algorithms do not have additional information about state or
search space other than how to traverse the tree, so it is also called blind search.

Following are the various types of uninformed search algorithms:

1. Breadth-first Search

2. Depth-first Search

3. Depth-limited Search

4. Iterative deepening depth-first search

5. Uniform cost search

6. Bidirectional Search

1. Breadth-first Search:
o Breadth-first search is the most common search strategy for traversing a tree or graph. This
algorithm searches breadthwise in a tree or graph, so it is called breadth-first search.
 o BFS algorithm starts searching from the root node of the tree and expands all successor node
at the current level before moving to nodes of next level.
o The breadth-first search algorithm is an example of a general-graph search algorithm.

o Breadth-first search implemented using FIFO queue data structure.

Advantages:

o BFS will provide a solution if any solution exists.

o If there are more than one solutions for a given problem, then BFS will provide the minimal
solution which requires the least number of steps.

Disadvantages:

o It requires lots of memory since each level of the tree must be saved into memory to expand
the next level.
o BFS needs lots of time if the solution is far away from the root node.

Example:
In the below tree structure, we have shown the traversing of the tree using BFS algorithm from the
root node S to goal node K. BFS search algorithm traverse in layers, so it will follow the path which is
shown by the dotted arrow, and the traversed path will be:

1. S---> A--->B---->C--->D---->G--->H--->E---->F---->I---->K

Time Complexity: Time Complexity of BFS algorithm can be obtained by the number of nodes
traversed in BFS until the shallowest Node. Where the d= depth of shallowest solution and b is a node
at every state.

T (b) = 1+b2+b3+.......+ bd= O (bd)

Space Complexity: Space complexity of BFS algorithm is given by the Memory size of frontier which
is O(bd).
Completeness: BFS is complete, which means if the shallowest goal node is at some finite depth,
then BFS will find a solution.

Optimality: BFS is optimal if path cost is a non-decreasing function of the depth of the node.

2. Depth-first Search
o Depth-first search is a recursive algorithm for traversing a tree or graph data structure.

o It is called the depth-first search because it starts from the root node and follows each path to
its greatest depth node before moving to the next path.
o DFS uses a stack data structure for its implementation.

o The process of the DFS algorithm is similar to the BFS algorithm.

Advantage:

o DFS requires very less memory as it only needs to store a stack of the nodes on the path from
root node to the current node.
o It takes less time to reach to the goal node than BFS algorithm (if it traverses in the right path).

Disadvantage:

o There is the possibility that many states keep re-occurring, and there is no guarantee of
finding the solution.
o DFS algorithm goes for deep down searching and sometime it may go to the infinite loop.

Example:
In the below search tree, we have shown the flow of depth-first search, and it will follow the order as:

Root node--->Left node ----> right node.

It will start searching from root node S, and traverse A, then B, then D and E, after traversing E, it will
backtrack the tree as E has no other successor and still goal node is not found. After backtracking it
will traverse node C and then G, and here it will terminate as it found goal node.
Completeness: DFS search algorithm is complete within finite state space as it will expand every
node within a limited search tree.

Time Complexity: Time complexity of DFS will be equivalent to the node traversed by the algorithm.
It is given by:

T(n)= 1+ n2+ n3 +.........+ nm=O(nm)

Where, m= maximum depth of any node and this can be much larger than d (Shallowest
solution depth)

Space Complexity: DFS algorithm needs to store only single path from the root node, hence space
complexity of DFS is equivalent to the size of the fringe set, which is O(bm).

Optimal: DFS search algorithm is non-optimal, as it may generate a large number of steps or high
cost to reach to the goal node.

3. Iterative deepening depth-first Search:

The iterative deepening algorithm is a combination of DFS and BFS algorithms. This search algorithm
finds out the best depth limit and does it by gradually increasing the limit until a goal is found.

This algorithm performs depth-first search up to a certain "depth limit", and it keeps increasing the
depth limit after each iteration until the goal node is found.

This Search algorithm combines the benefits of Breadth-first search's fast search and depth-first
search's memory efficiency.

The iterative search algorithm is useful uninformed search when search space is large, and depth of
goal node is unknown.

Advantages:

o Itcombines the benefits of BFS and DFS search algorithm in terms of fast search and memory
efficiency.
Disadvantages:

o The main drawback of IDDFS is that it repeats all the work of the previous phase.

Example:
Following tree structure is showing the iterative deepening depth-first search. IDDFS algorithm
performs various iterations until it does not find the goal node. The iteration performed by the
algorithm is given as:

1'st Iteration-----> A
2'nd Iteration----> A, B, C
3'rd Iteration------>A, B, D, E, C, F, G
4'th Iteration------>A, B, D, H, I, E, C, F, K, G
In the fourth iteration, the algorithm will find the goal node.

Completeness:

This algorithm is complete is if the branching factor is finite.

Time Complexity:

Let's suppose b is the branching factor and depth is d then the worst-case time complexity is O(bd).

Space Complexity:

The space complexity of IDDFS will be O(bd).

Optimal:

IDDFS algorithm is optimal if path cost is a non- decreasing function of the depth of the node.