Monthly Archive for February, 2005

I found this nice call for a talk held in Cambridge. I have to chase the organizers to see if the recorded the talk:

Most recent work on giving computers such “common sense” has focused on the use of formal logic and manual knowledge engineering. Instead, can we try a wider range of approaches? Can we build commonsense models using graphical models learned from sensory data or the web? Can we adopt a Wikipedia-like divide-and-conquer strategy? Can we use case-based reasoning, genetic programming, or reinforcement learning? The jury is still out about what methods people themselves use, but in building “human aware” systems we can look to a broader array of strategies that, together, could far exceed our own capabilities at commonsense thinking — leading, perhaps, to systems that understand people better than people understand themselves.

I started reading the book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, where Valentino Braitenberg describes a series of thought experiments in which “vehicles” with simple internal structure behave in unexpectedly complex ways.  The author describes simple control mechanisms that generate behaviors that, if we did not already know the principles behind the vehicles’ operation, we might call aggression, love, foresight and even optimism. Braitenberg gives this as evidence for the “law of uphill analysis and downhill invention,” meaning that it is much more difficult to try to guess internal structure just from the observation of behavior than it is to create the structure that gives the behavior.

This is a bit discouraging for my research in how to model people communication in space but, on the other hand, it is kind of obvious. What I also think of this book is that it came ages before Wolfram’s A new kind of science, of which it is claiming the same principle.

[some simulators]