Rational agents

In the book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach", Norvig and Russell define a rational agent as follows:

Rational agent: for each possible percept sequence, a rational agent should select an action that is expected to maximize its performance measure, given the evidence provided by the percept sequence and whatever bult-in knowledge the agent has.

The performance measure is the desirable action that we want the agent to perform (fixed and provided by the designer).

My question is: given an agent, a performance measure, the environment surrounding the agent and the actions that the agent is capable of doing, how can I prove that the agent is rational?

I know this is very general. I have an example from the book, but, it's an assignment and all I need are开发者_高级运维 directions.

Thank you,

List the actions the agent is capable of in terms of most-performant to least-performant (most compatible with or most resembling the desirable action, or laying groundwork for the target action... or at the very least not making it impossible or less-likely to achieve that action in the future)

You can prove the agent is rational by showing that it takes the desirable actions whenever possible.

EDIT: Given infinite possible decisions, you can examine the area around (a) the last decision, or (b) a random point in the n-dimensional space of possible decisions; if there's a "path" to a "higher" point, i.e. a more-rational action, and your agent does not take it, your agent is not acting rationally. If there is no such path, or if there is a path and the agent "follows" it, well, your agent may not be omniscient and rational, but according to the decisions it can "see" it is acting rationally.

In my thesis we used a baseline of a (pseudo) random opponent in the environment; if our agents could surpass the opponent more than 50% of the time through repeated experiments we had proven that our agents was not acting randomly, and was acting better than random. (Check up with your usual statistical tools to ensure reliable results et cetera)

But I do not know if that answers the question of being rational. I didn't really consider that point. But when it acts above random repeatedly, an agent must be acting deliberately to improve its situation in the environment.

Tougher opponents that are rational AI's in themselves then provides the actual benchmarks of performance. But does a rational agent mean an optimal agent? (Probably doesn't; there are hardly any optimal agents except for a few board games)

But better than random is always the place you want to be, when you're making an agent :) If not, it cannot be called AI ;)

It's a suggestion at least. Experimentation is a powerful thing, if the data is analysed and interpreted properly.