Building an intelligent agent

There are many ways to impart intelligence to an agent. The most commonly used techniques include machine learning, stored knowledge, rules, and so on. In this section, we will focus on machine learning. In this method, the way we impart intelligence to an agent is through data and training.

Let's see how an intelligent agent interacts with the environment:

Figure 8: An intelligent agent interaction with its environment

With machine learning, sometimes we want to program our machines to use labeled data to solve a given problem. By going through the data and the associated labels, the machine learns how to extract patterns and relationships.

In the preceding example, the intelligent agent depends on the learning model to run the inference engine. Once the sensor perceives the input, it sends it to the feature extraction block. Once the relevant features are extracted, the trained inference engine performs a prediction based...