Rationality in Decision Machines

This brief position paper1 sketches a view, in many respects conventional, of the role of rationality in artificial intelligence. In this view, rationality is primarily a way to describe coherence between actions and agent attitudes such as belief and preference. Decisions are the fundamental unit of calculation for a rational computer, and therefore we properly refer to them as decision machines. Collections of interacting decision machines, or decision factories , should not in general be expected to be rational, although we should exploit the rationality of their constituent machines in configuring decision factories.