PENTLAND@SRI-AI.ARPA (04/19/84)
[Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
WHAT: FOUNDATIONAL ISSUES IN ROBOT DESIGN AND THEIR METHODOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES
WHO: Stan Rosenschein, Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International
SERIES: Issues in Language, Perception and Cognition
WHERE: Room 100, Psychology Dept.
WHEN: Monday April 23, 1:00pm <- * Note Change *
The design of software which would allow robots to exhibit complex
behavior in realistic physical environments is a central goal of
Artificial Intelligence (AI). In structuring its approaches to this
problem, AI has over the years been guided by a melange of concepts
from logic, computer programming, and (prominently) by certain
pretheoretic intuitions about mental life and its relationship to
physical events embodied in ordinary "folk psychology." This talk
presents two contrasting views of how information, perception, and
action might be modeled by a robot designer depending on how seriously
he took "folk psychology." One view takes the ascription of mental
properties to machines quite seriously and leads to a methodology in
which the abstract entities of folk psychology ("beliefs," "desires,"
"plans," "intentions", etc.) are realized in a one-for-one fashion as
data structures in the robot program. Frequently these data structures
resemble, in certain ways, the sentences of an interpreted logical
languages in that they are taken to express the "content" of the
belief, desire, etc. The alternative view does not assume this degree
of mental structure a priori. Logic may figure prominently, but it is
used chiefly BY THE DESIGNER to define and reason about the
environment and its relation to desired robot behavior. The talk will
suggest an automata-theoretic approach to the content of information
states which sidesteps many of the presuppositions of the folk
psychology. The implications of such an approach for a systematic
robot software methodology will be discussed, including the
possibility of "organism compilers." The thesis that AI's reliance on
folk psychology is, on balance, useful will be left unresolved though
certainly not unquestioned.