Architectures That Exhibit Focused Behavior

The designers of most intelligent agents intend their agents to be operative in a complex, dynamic environment, usually the "real world" or some subset thereof. This, however, often causes significant practical problems: the real world provides a literally overwhelming amount of information to the agent; if the agent were to attempt to sense and process all this information, there would be very few computational resources remaining for other processes such as planning or learning.

One way in which this problem is overcome is by incorporating some form of focusing mechanism, whereby the agent determines what sort of information it needs to attack the current problem. It looks for and processes all relevant information it can, but (more or less) ignores other extraneous data. By focusing all of its processes only on the problem at hand, the combinatorial explosion of information from the world can be sidestepped.

The following list of architectures represents different implementations of focusing mechanisms that differ both in approach and extent.

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