Overview
The paper introducing Pengi, a system that played the arcade game Pengo using deictic representations rather than classical AI planning. Written with David Chapman, this paper demonstrated that complex, adaptive behavior could be achieved without building explicit world models or generating plans.
Pengi was both a technical achievement and a philosophical argument — a working system that showed the planning paradigm's assumptions about representation and reasoning were not necessary for intelligent behavior.
Significance
Along with Chapman's related work on "do the right thing" and Brooks' subsumption architecture, Pengi was part of a broader challenge to classical AI in the late 1980s. Agre's distinctive contribution was grounding the alternative in phenomenological philosophy rather than purely engineering arguments.