2.2 Technological Trends in Agent Research

The evolution of AI agents has undergone several stages, and here we take the lens of technological
trends to review its development briefly.

Symbolic Agents.
In the early stages of artificial intelligence research, the predominant approach
utilized was symbolic AI, characterized by its reliance on symbolic logic [56; 57]. This approach
employed logical rules and symbolic representations to encapsulate knowledge and facilitate reasoning
processes. Early AI agents were built based on this approach [58], and they primarily focused on two
problems: the transduction problem and the representation/reasoning problem [59]. These agents
are aimed to emulate human thinking patterns. They possess explicit and interpretable reasoning

7
TheRiseandPotentialofLargeLanguageModel BasedAgents