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- Title: Intention Is Choice With Commitment
- Author: Philip Cohen et. al.
- Publish Year: 1990
- Review Date: Tue, Jan 30, 2024
- url: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0004370290900555
Summary of paper
Contribution
This paper delves into the principles governing the rational balance between an agent’s beliefs, goals, actions, and intentions, offering valuable insights for both artificial agents and a theory of human action. It focuses on clarifying when an agent can abandon their goals and how strongly they are committed to these goals. The formalism used in the paper captures several crucial aspects of intentions, including an analysis of Bratman’s three characteristic functional roles of intentions and how agents can avoid intending all the unintended consequences of their actions. Furthermore, the paper discusses how intentions can be shaped based on an agent’s relevant beliefs and other intentions or goals. It also introduces a preliminary concept of interpersonal commitments by relating one agent’s intentions to their beliefs about another agent’s intentions or beliefs.
Some key terms
lack of commitment vs overcommitment in AI agent
- rational balance
- this paper tried to explore the relationship that intention plays in maintaining this balance
- to understand what it means for an agent to possess an intention, the paper emphasise the importance of describing how that intention influence the agent’s beliefs, commitments to future actions, and other interconnected intentions
Logic for affect mental state of users as well as agents
- the author proposed a logic suitable both for describing and reasoning about agent’s mental states as well as agents’ abilities to affect the mental states of others
- AGENTS needs to reason about the beliefs, intentions and commitments of other agents.
Intention in planning agent
If asked, the designer of a planning system may say that the notion of intention is defined operationally: A planning system’s intentions are no more than the contents of its plans. As such, intentions are representations of possible actions the system may take to achieve its goal(s).
- however, agents may form plans they never adopt, thus the notion of a plan lacks he characteristic commitment to action inherent in our commonsense understanding of intention
Intention in philosophical theory
- there can be two type of intentions
- For example, one’s future-directed intentions may include cooking dinner tomorrow, and one’s present-directed intentions may include moving an arm now
- this paper concentrate primarily on future-directed intentions
intention vs belief
- belief is often represented as proposition, intention is often represented as action
- intention is intimately connected with other attitude.
Bratman’s three functional roles for intention
- Intentions normally pose problems for the agent; the agent needs to determine a way to achieve them.
- Intentions serve as a “screen of admissibility” for the adoption of other intentions. Unlike desires, which can be inconsistent, agents typically do not adopt intentions that they believe conflict with their existing present- and future-directed intentions. For instance, if an agent intends to hardboil an egg and is aware that they have only one egg and cannot obtain more in time, it would be irrational for them to simultaneously intend to make an omelette, as these two intentions are in conflict with each other.
- Agents “track” the success of their attempts to achieve their intentions. Not only do agents care whether their attempts succeed, but they are disposed to replan to achieve the intended effects if earlier attempts fail.
not giving up too soon
- if an agent has an intention, he also needs to know what is the appropriate time to stop it
- the consistency maintainer needs to know whether the plan is carried out.
- McDermott attributes the problem to inability of various planning systems to express “Nell is going to be mashed unless I save her”
- Haas blames the problem on a failure to distinguish between the actual and possible events
intention as a composite concept
- Intention will be modelled as a composite concept specifying what the agent has chosen, and how the agent is committed to that choice.
Persistent goal
- occurs when an agent maintain a goal as long as specific conditions are met.
- Persistent goals reflect an agent’s commitment to a particular course of events over time.
- Intentions are modeled as a type of persistent goal, capturing both the agent’s choice and commitment.
- agents need not intend the expected side-effects of their intentions, as they may not be committed to those consequences due to changing beliefs.
idealisation setting
- the agent is going to adopt every persistent goal eventually
Summary
- the work developed a logic for intention
- communication and understanding intention is the key for so called “Agent” or assistant