Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI) Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien Tel.+43-1-53532810,5336112 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- VORTRAG ******* Prof.Dr.Aaron SLOMAN Cognitive Science Research Center University of Birmingham Playing God: A toolkit for experimenting with agent architectures ----------------------------------------------------------------- Most people who give definitions of AI offer narrow views of the scope of AI, whereas the research activities to be found in AI conferences, books, journals and laboratories have a very broad and deep scope, going beyond engineering objectives and the study or replication of human capabilities, to include exploration of the space of possible designs for behaving systems (design space) and the relationships between designs and various collections of requirements and constraints (niche space). This exploration is a multi-disciplinary affair, and includes both exploration of architectures, mechanisms, formalisms, inference systems, and the like (in natural and artificial designs), and also characterisation of various kinds of behavioural capabilities and the environments in which they are required, or possible. These mappings between design space and niche space are hard to analyse at a purely theoretical level, so we build working models to try out ideas, and get a deeper understanding of problems and, above all, the limitations of our provisional solutions. This talk describes a toolkit developed at The University of Birmingham, implemented in Poplog Pop-11, for experimenting with a variety of agent architectures. The simulations include one or more agents with a "mind" composed of a collection of coexisting interacting components, constructed from a combination of traditional symbolic AI mechanisms and sub-symbolic mechanisms such as neural nets. The toolkit smoothly integrates symbolic and sub-symbolic mechanisms in a hybrid system. Zeit: Donnerstag, 9.Maerz 1995, 18:30 Uhr pktl. Ort: OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.