Download Representations and sensorimotor loops in intelligent agents

Representations and sensorimotor loops in intelligent agents
Massimo Tria ([email protected])
Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, University of Siena
Via Roma 47, 53100 Siena, Italy
This paper examines the role of sensorimotor loops in current analyses of
intelligent agents, focussing on Brooks’s “intelligence without representations”
approach, and with a threefold aim.
First, commonalities between Brooks’s approach and methodological tenets of
earlier cybernetic views are emphasized. These commonalities address two
fundamental questions: first, the attempt to explain cognitive behaviours by referring to
observable performance alone with no reference to mentalistic terms and concepts and
second, by stressing the central role of an organism’s interactions with his own
environment.
Second, these commonalities enable one to isolate some epistemological problems
afflicting cybernetic accounts of human purposeful behaviours that are inherited by
Brooks’s approach. The most relevant problem afflicting cybernetics and BehaviorBased Robotics approaches regards the possibility of modelling so called ‘high-level’
behaviours – like problem solving, abstract reasoning and language – with explanatory
tools that seem to be suitable only for reactive behaviours – or in general to behaviours
that involve processes of physical adaptation to an environmental niche.
Third, behavioural studies of various insect species suggest that the austere set of
explanatory tools adopted by Brooks is insufficient even just to account for “low-level”
behaviours performed by simple insect-like organisms. Empirical data gathered in
particular from experiments on the desert ant Cataglyphis show how it seems to be
necessary invoking theoretical constructs like symbolic representations because of the
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evident capability of this insect to be independent from external stimulations and local
cues in order to perform his own feeding-related behaviours. These results can be
interpreted as the suitability and the importance of cognitive psychology and Artificial
Intelligence conceptual apparatus in explaining even the so called adaptive behaviours,
that are the actual theoretical core of cognitive sciences researches. I will briefly expose
the works of Maja Mataric that within a Behavior-Based perspective offers a critical
analysis of Brooks’s approach claiming that in fact Behavior-Based models and agents
need some sort of internal representing state – in other words, mental/symbolic
representation – in order to accomplish their tasks.
The opportunity of suitably amalgamating methodologies underlying traditional
AI and behaviour-based systems emerges from the confluence of these various
observations.
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