Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112
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VORTRAG
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Prof.Dr.Aaron SLOMAN
Cognitive Science Research Center
University of Birmingham
Playing God: A toolkit for experimenting with agent architectures
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Most people who give definitions of AI offer narrow views of the scope
of AI, whereas the research activities to be found in AI conferences,
books, journals and laboratories have a very broad and deep scope, going
beyond engineering objectives and the study or replication of human
capabilities, to include exploration of the space of possible designs
for behaving systems (design space) and the relationships between
designs and various collections of requirements and constraints (niche
space). This exploration is a multi-disciplinary affair, and includes
both exploration of architectures, mechanisms, formalisms, inference
systems, and the like (in natural and artificial designs), and also
characterisation of various kinds of behavioural capabilities and the
environments in which they are required, or possible.
These mappings between design space and niche space are hard to analyse
at a purely theoretical level, so we build working models to try out
ideas, and get a deeper understanding of problems and, above all, the
limitations of our provisional solutions.
This talk describes a toolkit developed at The University of Birmingham,
implemented in Poplog Pop-11, for experimenting with a variety of agent
architectures. The simulations include one or more agents with a
"mind" composed of a collection of coexisting interacting components,
constructed from a combination of traditional symbolic AI mechanisms and
sub-symbolic mechanisms such as neural nets. The toolkit smoothly
integrates symbolic and sub-symbolic mechanisms in a hybrid system.
Zeit: Donnerstag, 9.Maerz 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl.
Ort: OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.