The Quest for a Common Model of the Intelligent Decision Maker
The premise of Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and
Decision Making is that multiple disciplines share an interest in goal-directed
decision making over time. The idea of this paper is to sharpen and deepen this
premise by proposing a perspective on the decision maker that is substantive
and widely held across psychology, artificial intelligence, economics, control
theory, and neuroscience, which I call the "common model of the intelligent
agent". The common model does not include anything specific to any organism,
world, or application domain. The common model does include aspects of the
decision maker's interaction with its world (there must be input and output,
and a goal) and internal components of the decision maker (for perception,
decision-making, internal evaluation, and a world model). I identify these
aspects and components, note that they are given different names in different
disciplines but refer essentially to the same ideas, and discuss the challenges
and benefits of devising a neutral terminology that can be used across
disciplines. It is time to recognize and build on the convergence of multiple
diverse disciplines on a substantive common model of the intelligent agent.