Chapter 7 A Formal Model of Intelligent Agents 7.1 Introduction The artificial intelligence field is full of sophisticated mathematical models and equations, but most of these are highly specialized in nature — e.g. formalizations of particular logic systems, analyzes of the dynamics of specific sorts of neural nets, etc. On the other hand, a number of highly general models of intelligent systems also exist, including Hutter’s recent formalization of universal intelligence [ut05] and a large body of work in the disciplines of systems science and cybernetics — but these have tended not to yield many specific lessons useful for engineering AGI systems, serving more as conceptual models in mathematical form. It would be fantastic to have a mathematical theory bridging these extremes — a real "general theory of general intelligence," allowing the derivation and analysis of specific structures and processes playing a role in practical AGI systems, from broad mathematical models of general intelligence in various situations and under various constraints. However, the path to such a theory is not entirely clear at present; and, as valuable as such a theory would be, we don’t believe such a thing to be necessary for creating advanced AGI. One possibility is that the development of such a theory will occur contemporaneously and synergetically with the advent of practical AGI technology. Lacking a mature, pragmatically useful "general theory of general intelligence," however, we have still found it valuable to articulate certain theoretical ideas about the nature of general intelligence, with a level of rigor a bit greater than the wholly informal discussions of the previous chapters. The chapters in this section of the book articulate some ideas we have developed in pursuit of a general theory of general intelligence; ideas that, even in their current relatively undeveloped form, have been very helpful in guiding our concrete work on the CogPrime design. This chapter p