Intelligent Systems

Full course description

The course offers an introduction to intelligent systems, their components, design issues and possible development paths. Based on the metaphor of a computational agent (that is, a software program or a robot which acts and interacts flexibly and autonomously in order to achieve some goal), basic concepts and methods from agent technology are discussed. Topics covered are the concept of artificial intelligence, expert systems, characteristics of an agent and agent architectures, agent cooperation and competition among agents, behaviour-generation and -learning with the added complexity of a multi-agent environment, agent oriented world views and possible future paths to general artificial intelligence.  An emphasis is made on the complexity of interacting systems, both between different agents, but also between the subsystems of a single agent.  In the practical part of the course, the students build up their experience with the implementation of a number of different types of agents.