Building Blocks of Decision - Logic !!!

How do you navigate to a place in an unknown environment? When we aim to build an autonomous machine that can navigate its way in unknown environment it must understand and implement how to take decisions based on processing the received information.

To understand how a machine would find its way, let us understand how humans do the same thing by working our way through one imaginary world, the wumpus world. As we progress, we will understand the concepts that help in this decision making.

The Wumpus World

Imagine yourself in a world full of caves, one connected to another via doorways. One of those caves have tons of gold in it, and you have one aim in mind. Take the gold and be rich. Seems easy, just navigate around and find the gold. But there's a catch, some of the caves have pit in them(falling into which can kill you) and one of these caves is home to a terrible Beast called Wumpus, who'll eat you if it encounters you. Try to navigate around and see if you are able to reach the gold? Like any real world situation you cannot see where the pits or wumpus are.

World with no percepts

Congrats, if you found the gold. You sure are lucky, to find the gold in such an environment. Be at ease these unknown enviroments are not as cruel as they may seem, they provide us with some kind of informations that we can use. Even the wumpus world isn't as cruel. It provides you with the following information:

1. In the cave containing the wumpus and in the directly (not diagonally) adjacent caves, the agent will perceive a Stench.
2. In the cave directly adjacent to a pit, the agent will perceive a Breeze.
3. In the cave where the gold is, the agent will perceive a Glitter.
4. A cave can have only one of the above.

A smart agent like yourself can figure how these Percepts(information) can be brought to use.
// draw a graph onhover on any node will give the percepts there //

Navigating the wumpus world now seems easy, isn't? Yes, thats because you now how to apply Logic to analyze your situation and navigate further. Still there is one important aspect that needs to introduced!!! You remember the caves where you have already been and know about them, but machines need to be provided with this ability. Logical MAchine have Knowledge Base where they store all the information about the world they have seen and use this KB to analyze and navigate in an unknown environment.

With this information try to navigate around the wumpus world...

Surely, the experience would have been much more fun cause you were logical in your approach. This Knowledge Base that you generated can be shared with others. Surely you don't your friend to navigate the caves in fear of pits or the wumpus? So share your KB with him.

Knowledge once aqcuired can be passed onto other.
Navigation through the wumpus helps us build basic concepts of logic required for navigation in an unknown environment. In the real world the percepts received would be different and varied, and consequently the logic applied to analyze them would be more complex. But even the complex logic is build upon the simpler, more basic logical foundation that we have discussed.