Agent programs
We will be building intelligent agents throughout the book. They will all have the same skeleton,
namely, accepting percepts from an environment and generating actions. The early versions of
agent programs will have a very simple form (Figure 2.4). Each will use some internal data
structures that will be updated as new percepts arrive. These data structures are operated on by
the agent’s decision-making procedures to generate an action choice, which is then passed to the
architecture to be executed.
There are two things to note about this skeleton program. First, even though we defined
the agent mapping as a function from percept sequences to actions, the agent program receives
only a single percept as its input. It is up to the agent to build up the percept sequence in memory,
if it so desires. In some environments, it is possible to be quite successful without storing
the percept sequence, and in complex domains, it is infeasible to store the complete sequence.