At the most basic level of abstraction, an atomic act could be anything from contracting a muscle cell to provoking a war.
These egocentric sorts of actions may in turn result in modifying the agent's basic behavioral capacities, particularly in that updating memory implies some form of machine learning is possible.
It normally requires describing all sensor readings, the world, all of ones actions and all of one's goals in some form of predicate logic.
Satisficing is a decision-making strategy that attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than identify an optimal solution.
At least in their idealized form, distributed systems have many modules running in parallel and determining the best action based on local expertise.
In these idealized systems, overall coherence is expected to emerge somehow, possibly through careful design of the interacting components.
The important aspect of any such system is that when the agent needs to select an action, some solution exists that can be used immediately (see further anytime algorithm).
In particular, Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen provided the idea of an innate releasing mechanism to explain instinctive behaviors (fixed action patterns).
Stan Franklin has proposed that action selection is the right perspective to take in understanding the role and evolution of mind.
Archived 2006-10-09 at the Wayback Machine Some researchers create elaborate models of neural action selection.
See for example: The locus coeruleus (LC) is one of the primary sources of noradrenaline in the brain and has been associated with selection of cognitive processing, such as attention and behavioral tasks.
[3][4][5][6] The substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) is one of the primary sources of dopamine in the brain, and has been associated with action selection, primarily as part of the basal ganglia.
At the time, prevailing explanations of the purpose of those neurons was that they did not mediate action selection and were only modulatory and non-specific.[18] Prof.
Pascal Kaeser of Harvard Medical School subsequently obtained evidence that large SNc neurons can be temporally and spatially specific and mediate action selection.
Dioxetane cleavage (which can occur during somatic dopamine metabolism by quinone degradation of melanin) was contemporaneously proposed to generate high energy triplet state electrons by Prof. Doug Brash at Yale, which could provide a source for electrons for the CNET mechanism.