Technical terminology

Since, for some of you, this is your first journey into AI, it's important that you have a small glossary of the technical terms that are used throughout this book (and in general, in AI). We have already encountered some of these in the past few pages:

• Agents are systems that are capable of autonomous reasoning toward solving a specific set of goals.
• Backward Chaining is the process of tracing the cause of a problem by working backwards.
• Blackboard is an architecture for exchanging data between different agents, and sometimes even within the agent itself (especially in Unreal).
• Environment is the world where an agent lives. For instance, the game world is the environment of an NPC from the same game. Another example is a chess board, which represents the environment of a system that plays chess against humans (or other systems).
• Forward Chaining, opposite to Backward Chaining, is the process to work forward to find the solution to a problem.
• Heuristic is a practical approach to problem-solving, which does not guarantee to be optimal, nor sufficient for immediate goals. Heuristic methods are used when finding the optimal solution to a problem is impractical (if not impossible), in order to find a satisfactory solution. They can be thought of as mental shortcuts to lighten cognitive load during a decision-making process. Sometimes, it can represent the knowledge of an agent based on his/her past experience (although this is often given a-priori). The term "Heuristic" derives from ancient Greek, with the meaning of "find" or "discover".