Reflection #4 – Embodied Cognitive Science

Synopsis:

This chapter of Janusz Kacprzyk and Vito Trianni’s Evolutionary Swarm Robotics deals with Embodied Cognitive Science. It goes through a history of Cognitive Science and relates it to theories such as Connectionism and Functionalism. These ideas center greatly on determining whether machines can be intelligent and defining the parameters by which a machine can be considered intelligent. 

Useful Terms and my interpretation of them:

• Artificial Intelligence:
  • the ability of machines to mimic human reasoning

• Cybernetics:
  • Dealing with control theory and statistical information theory
  • Forefather of Artifical Intelligence
  • Modeling agent with the environment
  • sense think act cycle (act react system)

• Behaviourism
  • responds to a stimulus

• Practitioners of AI
  • Value the ability to work mentally rather than responding from a stimulus

• Unity
  • A system with boundaries that encompass a number of elementary components
  • self-organizing robotic systems

• Connectionism
  • interconnected networks of simple units
  • symbolic spacially structured representation

• Functionalism
  • Symbolic syntactically structured representation

• Subsumption Architecture
  • used in behavior-based robotics

• Situatedness
  • being in the world

• Embodiment
  • acting in the world

Reflection:

This reading was quite technical and I found it somewhat difficult to digest. However, there were some points that stuck out to me. Firstly, I found it interesting that the claim was made that machines can never truly be intelligent because they will always be allopoeitc since they can never be living organisms (pg 19) 

This interests me because I am very intrigued by the question of whether robots need to be an artificial replica of nature to be considered successful. This seems to be the general consensus. The topic is mildly addressed in the article and made me think back to the children’s interpretation of the robotic fish. See extract below for article’s take on the question;

Not in looks, but in action, the model must resemble an animal.
Therefore, it must have these or some measure of these attributes: exploration, curiosity, free-will in the sense of unpredictability, goal-
seeking, self-regulation, avoidance of dilemmas, foresight, memory, learning, forgetting, association of ideas, form recognition, and the
elements of social accommodation. Such is life.

Grey Walter, 1953, pp. 120-121

Two other things that intrigued me were the idea of the Chinese experiment. By that logic with no intention, there can be no intelligence. By that logic artificial intelligence is a paradox in itself because while a machine can be responsive it can never achieve innate intention – Or can it? How is intention defined?

The article also brings up a valid point, we do not truly understand simple natural phenomena so how can we jump to complex cognitive thought processes. The start of robotics should look at building machines that can interact with the real world.