DynaPsych Table of Contents

 

Toward Virtually Embodied AI:

Embedding Novamente

in a Simulated World

 

Ben Goertzel & Cassio Pennachin

1          Introduction

This document discusses the use of the Novamente AI Engine (see www.agiri.org) to control the behavior of agents in a simulated world.  It is brief but reflects a great deal of thought and analysis, and many discussions between the authors and others inside and outside the Novamente project.  

The final section discusses a particular example simulation world (EDEN = EDucational Environment for Novamente), but this example is introduced mostly for sake of the clarity that comes with concreteness, rather than because it is a particularly fascinating example.  Until that section, the discussion is not focused on any particular simulated world, but is intended to be totally general in nature.  Further documentation, more specific in nature, will be required for any particular Novamente/simulation-world project (including any pragmatic implementation of EDEN).

This is not a highly technical document, but merely an abstract “conceptual design” document, which will in time be supplemented with documents specifying detailed technical designs.  In spite of the abstract level of discussion, however, this is an internal document for Novamente-savvy readers, rather than a general document for outsiders.  Knowledge at the level of the Novamente overview papers on the agiri.org website will be required to get anything at all out of the document. 

1.1        What Do We Mean by a Simulation World?

For the purposes of this document, it is assumed that the simulation world consists of a simulated 2D or (the main case of interest) 3D physical environment, and that Novamente is given control of one or more agents, each one of which is localized in a particular “body” within the environment.  Each body is supplied with sensors and actuators, and

The particular set of sensors and actuators involved is very important for practical purposes, although the general approach described in this document works for essentially any set of sensors and actuators.  We are thinking in particular of

We are not concerning ourselves here with the details of robot control – for instance, with the mechanisms of controlling a robot arm or steering a robot in a certain direction.  This sort of thing can be handled in Novamente, but we feel it’s a less interesting area of focus than higher-level control, and certainly it’s highly context-specific.

Regarding sensory processing, we are willing to make use of existing sense-stream processing tools – for example, if camera-eye input is involved, we are quite willing to use existing vision processing software and feed Novamente its output (the software-architecture required to support this will be discussed below).  In this example, we would also like Novamente to have access to the raw output of the camera eye, so that it can carry out subtler perception processing if it judges this appropriate.

Next, we assume that there are particular goals one wants the Novamente-controlled agent to achieve in the simulated environment.  These goals may be defined abstractly, but they should be definable formally, in terms of an Evaluator software object that can look at the log of Novamente’s behavior in the simulated world over a period of time and assess the extent to which Novamente has fulfilled its goals.  There may be general goals, such as “discover novel information about the world”, and also specific task-oriented goals imposed by the human teachers/programmers.

 

1.2        Experiential Learning and the Need for an Educational Curriculum

Most “AI” programs that control agents in simulation worlds operate using expert rules.  The Novamente approach, on the other hand, is based on experiential interactive learning.  Initially, Novamente will be either

It has to figure out how to act in the simulation world, based on feedback.  The feedback is provided via Novamente’s in-built goal system, which reinforces behaviors that appear to help the system achieve its goals, and weaken behaviors that appear to act against the system’s goals.  Feedback from human teachers may be incorporated into the learning process, to the extent that Novamente is given an initial goal of pleasing its human teachers.

Experiential learning in a simulated environment is not an easy task, and if a Novamente system is simply started up, given simulated sensors and actuators, and asked to achieve a complex goal, it is very likely to flail around uselessly for a long time, possibly forever.   Of course, this would not be true if the system were given a huge enough allocation of computational resources, but we are considering the case of plausible resource allocation.  This observation leads to the notion of a systematic educational program for Novamente. 

While the end goals for Novamente may be extremely sophisticated, we consider it important to define a series of progressively more difficult and complex goals, beginning with very simple ones.  The goal series must be defined so that, with each goal Novamente learns to achieve, its “internal ontology” of learned cognitive procedures is appropriately enlarged. 

The role of experiential learning in shaping a Novamente’s “mind-space” should not be underestimated.  Recall that the Novamente software design does not provide a full “cognitive architecture,” only a high-level cognitive architecture, and then a set of processes within which a more detailed cognitive architecture may emerge through experiential learning.  The detailed cognitive architecture then consists of a “dual network” (hierarchy/heterarchy) of learned procedures, appropriate for various sorts of activity in various sorts of context.  For the cognitive architecture to build up properly, requires the right sort of experience.  The “educational program” described in Section 4 of this document, in the context of EDEN, describes an example of what we think will be the right sort of experience.

 

1.3        The Value of Simulation Worlds

What is the value of experimenting with Novamente in simulation worlds, as opposed to other things that one might do with Novamente systems?

There are two sorts of answers to this, of course:

  1. There may be specific practical or scientific reasons why one wants an AI controlling agents in a simulation world, and Novamente may fit the bill
  2. There may be reasons why controlling agents in a simulation world is a good thing for Novamente AI itself, apart from any external goals

Here we will discuss only the second sort of reason. 

The main thing that a simulation world has to offer Novamente development is: integration of perception, action and cognition in the context of goal-achievement.  This integration is, we believe, critical to the development of true general intelligence in a Novamente AI system.  The reason for this is subtle, and has to do with the psynet model of mind, the theoretical framework underlying the Novamente system.  According to the psynet model, the most essential aspects of mind is the network of emergent structures and processes that arises in a complex cognitive system in the course of its self-analysis and its interaction with the world.  In order for a sufficiently complex self-organizing internal emergent knowledge/process-network to emerge, goal-directed perception/action/cognition integration seems to be required.  Many pragmatically interesting applications of the Novamente codebase – for instance, datamining or text mining applications – do not naturally support this kind of integration, and hence are not as interesting as paths to AGI (in spite of their intense independent interest).

Many people, when they hear about the “simulation world” idea, ask why one wants to mess around with simulations instead of just going the robotics route.  We have two main responses to that.

The glib answer is that playing around with robotics/AI combinations inevitably seems to lead to spending 95% of one’s time on robotics and 5% of one’s time on AI.  But of course, this glib answer could potentially be circumvented via the addition of a large, dedicated robotics team to the project (not a terribly likely near-term possibility, in fact). 

There is a less glib answer as well, which is that getting Novamente to work well in any environment (real or simulated) will initially be a big job – and a job requiring lots of iterated experimentation, with Novamente configurations that vary in various ways.  Compared to running experiments in a simulated world is far cheaper, and far more easily parallelizable.  Once Novamente has achieved a high level of functionality in a simulated world, exploring its performance in a similar robotically-achieved real-world environment will certainly be an interesting next step.

 

2          Internal Novamente Structures, Processes and Cognitive Architecture

This section briefly describes the structures and processes needed to make a Novamente AI Engine function in a simulation environment.

 

2.1        Software Architecture Issues

The current Novamente software architecture is basically adequate for dealing with agent-control in a simulation world.  However, a couple small additions are required in order to handle this sort of application with elegance and efficiency.   These additions don’t modify the core AI architecture of the system, they are more at the software-systems level, pertaining to interactions between core AI processes and the external world (the simulation world).   We will discuss these additions here on a conceptual level, omitting implementation details.

Firstly, we require a core service, in the Novamente server, dealing with interactions with the simulation world.  A core service is basically a server which listens to a port for TCP connections and handles them in multiple threads (one thread would correspond to one interaction channel in this case).  This SimulationProxyServer (to invent a plausible name) will require careful engineering due to the need for real-time interaction between Novamente and the simulation world.

Next, a special software mechanism may be desired for perceptual preprocessing, and for action postprocessing.  Ideally we would handle all percepts and actions – no matter how fine-grained -- as schemata inside the Novamente core, but this strategy would be very demanding on the Novamente system in terms of processing speed, and would also introduce a lot of complexity into the system, some of it unnecessary.   For initial experiments, therefore, we feel it probably makes sense to implement the more elementary processing of perception and action outside the Novamente core.  For instance, if dealing with visual sensors, it may be desirable to use standard, non-Novamente-based algorithms for elementary vision processing such as edge detection and shape-from-motion analysis.   Similarly, if dealing with robotic control, it may make sense initially to use standard algorithms to direct the movements of the joints of a robot arm (having Novamente simply give the arm its overall desired destination, and any constraints on its motion).  Ultimately, a Novamente learning approach will be useful at these low levels, but for starters we feel it may be better for Novamente efforts to focus on the cognitive level.

Based on this plan, we posit PerceptionManager and ActionManager objects, which exist outside the Novamente core, and relay information between the core and the simulation world.  In this approach, the SimulationProxyServer communicates with these Manager objects rather than with the simulation world directly.

Finally, it is important that the simulation world, the Novamente core, and the perception and action Managers all log their input and outputs into a common database, the ExperienceDB, which can then be mined later on and studied with both intelligence-improvement and simulation-world-improvement in mind.

 

2.2        Cognitive Architecture

Novamente is quite flexible as regards cognitive architecture, and there are many approaches that can plausibly be taken.  The right cognitive architecture for simulated-agent-control will likely only be learned via experience.  Here we sketch our initial ideas, which we believe will be serviceable for experimentation.

For the control of a single-interaction-channel agent, we propose a six-Unit Novamente configuration, consisting of Lobes devoted to:

  1. Perceptual schema execution
  2. Action schema execution
  3. General cognition
  4. Global attentional focus
  5. Interaction-channel-specific attentional focus
  6. Schema learning

This is a close-to-maximal architecture: we are not sure we will need this many Lobes, but we are sure we won’t need more than this in the near term.

For early experimentation, the Attentional Focii can be omitted, leaving only 4 lobes.  

For initial experimentation, 2 lobes (# 3 and 6) can be used, but this is unlikely to provide adequate performance, because the perception/action schema execution and general cognition are going to be very difficult to schedule together in a single lobe.

Of course, if linguistic communication is part of the simulated world, then a collection of language-processing Lobes must be added, as described in the Novamente book.

 

2.3        Cognitive Dynamics

Now to the crux of the problem: what MindAgents will be involved here, and for what purposes?  How can we relate the MindAgents’ activities to the simulation world itself?

This topic is dealt with in detail in the Experiential Interactive Learning chapter of the Novamente book, and so it will only be briefly reviewed here.

The actions Novamente takes in the simulated world are induced by the invocation of the execute() functions inside SchemaNodes.  A very simple action may be induced by a single SchemaNode, but most actions will be carried out via the coordinated activity of multiple SchemaNodes.  Thus, from a pragmatic perspective, the essential core of Novamente intelligence in a simulated-world context (and arguably, in any truly AGI-oriented context) is schema learning.   Other cognitive processes may be understood from the perspective of how they support schema learning.  In this section we will give a quick run-through of key Novamente cognitive processes from a schema-learning-centric perspective, without pretense of completeness.

A comment about the internals of Novamente SchemaNodes is pertinent here.  The current version of SchemaNode supports only “first-order” schemata, i.e. its internal schemata do not include either variables or higher-order functions (which may be used to substitute for variables according to mechanisms from combinatory logic).  Before simulation-world-oriented schema learning can be seriously undertaken, this deficit must be remedied, and we must implement higher-order SchemaNodes (according to the combinatory-logic approach).  A Novamente-focused combinatory logic interpreter has been written by Luke Kaiser, and integration of this with the Novamente core is estimated to be a 1-3 month project for a knowledgeable C++ programmer.

 

2.3.1        Algorithms for Schema Learning

Schema learning is carried out in Novamente via a combination of probabilistic inference and evolutionary learning, specifically

 

2.3.2        Goal Dynamics

Schema learning is driven by goals: the system tries to learn procedures that will help it to fulfill its goals.  It tries to learn very specific procedures that will allow it to fulfill its goals in specific contexts, and more abstract procedural patterns that will allow it to fulfill its goals in more broadly defined contexts.

The initial goals of the system are provided by the humans who set the system up (initially, by the programmers; in later Novamente versions perhaps by system administrators through some kind of goal-configuration UI).   The mutability or otherwise of these initial goals is, to a large extent, a choice to be made by the same humans who set the goals.  Obviously, we humans can overcome and “reprogram” our inborn biological goals, as well as elaborating and refining them; the extent to which AI systems should possess this property is a deep and multifaceted question, which we will not pursue here.  The extent to which a Novamente system may be able to effectively mutate or circumvent its initially given goals without actually modifying the given GoalNodes, is also a tricky issue left for analysis elsewhere.

Assuming the initial goals are left immutable, then Novamente is left with cognitive tasks such as:

Since a GoalNode is merely a wrapper for a predicate (and hence very similar to a PredicateNode, the difference being how some MindAgents treat it), both of these goal-oriented cognitive tasks may be carried out through generic Novamente probabilistic-inference and PredicateNode-creation methods.

 

2.3.3        Perception and Action

Perception and action are carried out by schemata, whose inputs may include complex predicates representing patterns observed in the world (the perception case) or patterns in the mind triggering actions (the action case).  Most of the learning of perception and action schemata must, we believe, be carried out in the context of a perception-action-cognition loop, rather than in an isolated way.  There are many ways to perceive the environment, and a mind needs to find those ways that will allow it to carry out useful actions – for instance, a mind may judge two entities as equal if it has no use to distinguish them.  Some of the teaching exercises described below focus on perception or action in isolation, but by and large our inclination is to teach the two things in an integrated way.

 

2.3.4        Forming and Managing Declarative Knowledge

A large percentage of the Novamente design has to do with the creation and maintenance of declarative knowledge.  From a schema-learning-centric perspective, the function of declarative knowledge is to aid with

It is the use of declarative knowledge, via these mechanisms, that allows a Novamente system to learn via experience, rather than approaching each task presented to it by the environment as a brand new optimization problem.  Association-formation, probabilistic inference, and various concept and predicate creation heuristics are important here; finding the optimal combination of these processes for a simulation-world context will be a nontrivial task.

 

2.3.5        Automated Parameter Adaptation

The optimal mixture of cognitive processes for agent-control in simulation-worlds is not known, and may be different in different simulation worlds.  Concretely, this means that the importance values associated with MindAgents – and used to allocate time to different MindAgents – will initially be set by heuristic intuition, and then be allowed to adapt over time.  Much of this adaptation must be done in the context of simple, early-stage training tasks, because the learning time required for later-stage tasks may be too great to enable extensive experimentation with such parameter settings. 

Of course, there are also other parameters besides the MindAgent importance levels to be optimized – internal parameters of various MindAgents.  This has implications for the simulation-world test framework, to be discussed below.

 

3          Test Framework Architecture

The Novamente design tells us how to create a software system capable of adaptively learning to control agents in simulated worlds.  However, the design as it now exists doesn’t fill in all the details.  There are many free parameters to be tuned, and even beyond that, experience shows us that some of the algorithms and knowledge representation mechanisms will be found to need tweaking as experimentation proceeds.  Experimentation is therefore key to this sort of project, and systematic experimentation requires a reliable, properly-designed testing framework.

The most general simulation-world testing framework would have the following properties:

Of course, for pragmatic reasons, it may be worthwhile to create an initial testing framework with less generality.  For early experiments, all we really need is a framework so that

The next steps beyond this would be to allow each simulation world to involve a fixed number K of Novamente systems (so that Novamentes can interact with each other), and to allow Novamentes to be loaded from files (allowing knowledge accumulation over time).   The test framework may be incrementally expanded so as to gradually work up to full generality.

All test results and configurations must be logged in an ExperimentDB, for subsequent analysis by statistical and machine learning methods.

One point in the above testing-framework description is worthy of further note: In order for testing of various Novamente systems to be carried out in a systematic way, we need to have an automated way of evaluating the success of a given Novamente system in a given scenario.  This must be supplied by the humans who have created the scenario, and will ideally be supplied in the form of a quantitative fitness function (i.e. not just a binary indicator of success vs. failure). 

Given a fitness function, the testing frameworks described above run tests automatically, using BOA to find the optimal Novamente parameters for the given scenario and fitness function.

We have implemented a Linux-based, BOA-driven distributed testing framework for use in time-series prediction applications, which is currently in heavy use, and which may be modifiable into a simulation-world testing framework with a moderate amount of effort.

 

4          Stages of Mental Development

The need for a systematic educational program was mentioned above.  Of course, one can formulate a specific educational program only in the context of a particular simulation world. However, it is possible to outline an approach to designing educational programs, independently of the details of the simulation world.

Our approach to designing educational programs is based on the notion of stages of mental development.  In an abstract sense, this is similar to the educational theories of Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, and others.  However, we will not stick close to the details of any prior stage-oriented educational theory, given our focus on digital rather than human education. 

Another influence on our thinking has been the work of Peter Voss and his colleagues on the a2i2 project[1].  Voss’s project involves giving an AI system sensors and actuators, and having it learn to achieve goals in its environment; it also involves a staged educational program.  The details of his AI design are quite different from those of Novamente, and as a consequence his specific choice of environment and educational program are not quite perfectly suited for Novamente; but nevertheless, both Novamente and a2i2 could meaningfully be tested in each others’ simulated environments.

We introduce here the notion of a functionality-specific developmental dag.[2]  We consider four example functionalities:

  1. vision
  2. physical-action-formulation
  3. goal refinement
  4. language
  5. learning by instruction

In each of these cases, one may identify a set of developmental stages so that

An interesting twist is that the “developmental stages” associated with a single functionality are not necessarily arrangeable in a simple linear ordering.  Rather, the ordering of developmental stages may take the form of a directed acyclic graph (dag) rather than a simple series of steps.  Different developmental subsequences may begin together, as a single sequence, and then branch off, sometimes reconverging.  Further, these subsequences will often be interdependent.

Of course, the five examples we will give here don’t tell the whole story.  In a separate document, we will present developmental dags corresponding to all aspects of Novamente cognition, and discuss the interdependencies between these sequences.  However, elaboration to that extent would not be appropriate in an overview document such as this one.

Fig. 1: Developmental dag for Vision Processing

 

 

Fig. 2:  Developmental dag for Physical-Action Conception

 

Fig. 3:  Developmental dag for Goal Refinement

 

Fig. 4: Developmental dag for Linguistics

The idea of stage-based educational program design is simple: one creates a series of “teaching tasks” corresponding to the series of stages identified with a given functionality.  What makes this subtle is that the functionalities are not really separate, so that the stages of development of the different functionalities must be considered together.  For instance, a system is not going to be able to start making meaningful descriptions, commands or requests until it has learned to recognize objects.  Or, less trivially, it is likely that the learning of syntactic language and the learning of complex-action-sequence composition based on indirectly-evaluable goals will be learned together, as both of these require similar cognitive operations.

A very important developmental dag is the one that has to do with learning by instruction.

Fig. 5  Developmental dag for learning by instruction

 

In the following section on EDEN, we will see examples of the different phases of learning by instruction.  We believe that, once one has obtained a Novamente system that is able to interpret symbolic instructions given by a teacher, the greatest hurdle in achieving AGI has actually been overcome.  Language learning and advanced cognition certainly present significant challenges, but the largest challenge in AGI, we believe, is getting an AI system to fully understand symbolism based on its own experience in the world.  Once this has been achieved, one has a system that is teachable in a fundamental sense, and one has moved on to a new phase of AGI research.

 

5          EDEN: A Simple Example Simulation Environment

In order to flesh out the above ideas further, in other documents and discussions, we feel it will be useful to define a “reference simulation world” to use as the basis for examples.  For that purpose, we propose here a world we call EDEN (an acronym for EDucational Environment for Novamente).  EDEN is relatively simple compared to many simulation worlds one might conceive, yet it is complex enough to display all the features we feel are necessary for deep experiential interactive learning. 

EDEN also has the nice property that all its constructs are, on the face of it, realizable in terms of contemporary robotics technology.  So, one can interpret EDEN as a hypothetical near-term robotics-based test environment for Novamente, as well as a hypothetical near-term simulation environment.  However, we stress that in the short term, for reasons given above, we consider experimentation in simulated environments to be a much more productive use of engineering and testing time. 

The agents in EDEN are simulated mobile wheeled robots.  They are not unlike small vehicles, supplied with a couple extra accessories, namely:

These robots drive around in an environment which may be simple or complex, and which may contain a large number of robots with different properties, and a large number of non-robot objects, such as obstacles to drive around, blocks to manipulate, etc.

 

5.1        EDEN Primitives

This section sketches a possible set of perception and action primitives for EDEN. 

 

5.2        Fragments of a EDEN Educational Program

In this section we will give some specific educational tasks that we believe could meaningfully form part of a EDEN educational program.  The tasks given here do not, in themselves, form a complete EDEN educational program, because they are not linked together systematically enough.  A complete educational program would require a more complete inventory of developmental dags than was given above.  The point is that this not-yet-formulated complete educational program will include components like the ones described here:

 

5.2.1        Tasks involving Direct Environmental Reinforcement

Instruction in EDEN would start out with tasks that involve direct reinforcement from the environment, rather than instruction by a teacher.  Example scenarios might be:

5.2.1.1       Track object motion

An object (sometimes another robot, sometimes different sort of object) is placed in the environment, and moved around.  The agent (robot) is rewarded if it follows this motion with one of its pointers.

5.2.1.2       Predict object position

An object is placed in the environment, and moved around.  The agent is rewarded if it systematically points its pointer to the location where the object is going to move in the near future.

5.2.1.3       Follow robot

A robot is placed in the environment, and drives around.  The agent is rewarded for following it (without colliding with it!).

5.2.1.4       Move object to landmark location

Pick up an object and move it to the top of a hill, the bottom of a basin, etc.

If a single Novamente-robot is taught one of these things, its behavior will be dominated by the schema carrying out that one particular activity – i.e. it will learn, through reinforcement, that carrying out this one particular activity is how to get reward.  In order to teach a single Novamente several of these things, some primitive form of contextualizing communication is required.  For instance, one could describe each task by a single phrase, and tell Novamente this word prior to beginning to reward it for solving the task.  Then it can learn that, in the context defined by the descriptor phrase “follow robot,” following a robot is what gives reward, and so forth.

 

5.2.2        Learning to be Taught

Once we have figured out how to get Novamente to learn to perform simple tasks in the environment, the next step is to teach it to learn from a teacher.  In the EDEN context, the teacher will be represented by another robot.  Teaching-to-learn oriented scenarios might look like:

5.2.2.1       Imitate teacher robot

A teacher-robot is placed into the environment, and the robot is rewarded for imitating it.  This lays the foundation for many future lessons.

5.2.2.2       Bring objects to the teacher

The student is rewarded for spontaneously picking up and delivering certain sorts of objects to the teacher.

5.2.2.3       Pick up an object indicated by the teacher

This task is a good opportunity for moving from iconic instruction (imitating the teacher) to indexical instruction (where the teacher does something that tells the student what to do, but that does not directly mimic what the student is intended to do).   In this scenario, the robot representing the teacher may indicate the target object by circling around it, driving near it repeatedly, etc.  The student must learn that he’s not supposed to copy the teacher’s circling behavior, but is rather supposed to do something with the object the teacher is circling around.

5.2.2.4       Search for an object similar to a given target object

Where the object is indicated by the teacher via circling or other indexical means.  This tests the combination of inferential-similarity-judgment and finding-behavior.

5.2.2.5       Move object from A to B

The teacher may indicate the object to be moved, and the target location B, by indexical communication (e.g. by circling around the object, and then driving to B; or by moving the object itself and then returning it, etc.)

5.2.2.6       Move group of objects from A to B, maintaining the arrangement of the objects in the group; OR Create a copy of the object-arrangement A, out of objects found in a disorganized pile, or out of objects that have to be found hidden throughout the environment

The challenge with these two is to communicate the task to the robot without use of language.  The use of a teacher robot is in principle adequate, but many repeated lessons will surely be required.

 

5.2.3        Learning Symbolic Communication

The next stage of learning involves learning about symbolism, and learning to accept symbolic commands.  This has to do with language learning in a general sense, but it has many stages prior to the learning of complex syntax.  In principle advanced symbolic communication could be learned purely via gestures (in the manner of sign language for the deaf, for example), but pragmatically, it is easiest to give the robots in EDEN the ability to send and receive strings of text.  This perceptual simplification does not trivialize the problem of learning to interpret strings of texts as relating symbolically to the experienced world.

Verbal commands could be issued to the Novamente-controlled agent independently of the teacher, but we are guessing it is best to have linguistic commands emanate from the teacher, a concretely-defined agent.  This will cause Novamente to understand that language is a matter of communication between roughly similar agents, and will encourage it to model its own linguistic behavior on that of its teacher (based on the other similarities between itself and its teacher, e.g. they’re both embodied as robots in EDEN).

5.2.3.1       Obey simple verbal commands

This can be taught alongside other behaviors, at the iconic or indexical level.  For instance, when driving the teacher can say “Drive!”, and when stopping the teacher can say “Stop!”  Novamente will then learn to associate the words with the behaviors, and if the teacher says “Stop!” without actually stopping, Novamente may stop anyway based on the built-up word-behavior associations. 

5.2.3.2       Verbally identify objects and robots

If the teacher says “Bart” whenever driving near a certain robot, imitation behavior should cause Novamente to say “Bart” as well.

5.2.3.3       Obey compound verbal commands

This requires the teacher to instruct Novamente in the use of connectives like AND, OR, NOT, and THEN (the latter in the temporal sense).  This may be done via repeated examples, using elementary commands that Novamente already understands well.  For example, “Drive and honk” versus “Drive or honk.”

5.2.3.4       Verbally identify compounds

“Bart and mountain”, “teacher and mountain”, “teacher on mountain”, “Novababy under mountain”, etc.  Through repeated use of these phrases by the teacher to identify parts of the environment, Novamente will learn to ground the connective words in a descriptive context.

5.2.3.5       Use modifiers in verbal descriptions

“Big robot”, “big mountain” , etc. – the internal mechanisms of learning modifiers are discussed reasonably carefully in the experiential learning chapter in the Novamente book.

 

5.2.4        Modest Ambitions

Once Novamente can understand simple symbolic commands, it should be able to understand collections of interlocking symbolic commands.  Thus, for example, it should be able to understand the rules of a game.  This leads to tasks such as:

5.2.4.1       Learn to run a race

What has to be learned her are rules: do you have to stay on a certain racecourse, are you allowed to smash into other robots, etc.

5.2.4.2       Learn the rules of tic-tac-toe

This is a big test.  If one gets to the stage where one can teach a Novamente system to play tic-tac-toe via verbal and symbolic instructions, then teaching, say, chess, is just a moderate quantitative leap.

5.2.4.3       Learn to create interesting shapes out of objects, or to roll one’s wheels in paint and drive interesting paint-patterns on the ground

Novamente contains the basic mechanisms for creativity, so the thing to be learned here is how to create things that will please others.  It may be valuable to have more than one teacher for this exercise, so that relativity of judgment can be understood.

 

6          Acknowledgements

The first author is indebted to Peter Voss (www.adaptiveai.com) for many discussions on experiential learning and general intelligence over the past 5 years, some of them highly pertinent to the ideas in this paper.

 

 


[1] www.adaptiveai.com

[2] dag = directed acyclic graph