The intelligent agent model still deals with deterministic machines that take input and produce output, but it incorporates the possibility of changing the agent's internal state by presenting the output function as just taking the entire input history X* as an input to the function that produces the latest output Y, so that a different history of inputs can lead to a different output on the latest input, just like it can with humans and more sophisticated machines.

At first, I didn't quite understand this. But I'm reading Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation. Are you using the * in the same sense here as it is used in the following UNIX-style regular expression?

• '[A-Z][a-z]*'

This expression is intended to refer to all word that begin with a capital letter and do not contain any surprising characters such as ö or -. Examples: "Jennifer", "Washington", "Terminator". The * means [a-z] may have an arbitrary amount of iterations.