Design principles of autonomous agents

Agent for tasks
Principles of intelligence
Modeling natural systems

Pfeifer, Rolf/ Scheier, Christian (1999 / 2001). Understanding Intelligence

The „design principles of autonomous agents“ represent a compact way of characterizing the essence of what we mean by an intelligent system. […] There are three potential goals when building an artificial agent:

(1) building an agent for a particular task or a set of tasks,
(2) studying general principles of intelligence, and
(3) modeling certain aspects of natural systems, that is, humans or animals.