SAB'98 Workshop

Grounding Emotions in Adaptive Systems

Michel Aubé

Université de Sherbrooke,
Sherbrooke, Qc, CANADA, J1K 2R1
Fax: +1 (819) 821-7950, Phone: +1 (819) 821-8000, ext. 2426 (office)
maube@courrier.usherb.ca

Designing Adaptive Cooperating Animats Will Require Designing Emotions: Expanding upon Toda's Urge Theory

Cooperation is too abstract a concept to be implemented as a single urge (p. 269). [...] theity of human emotions are social in nature, specifically developped so as to make theive group cooperation feasible (p. 261). (Masanao Toda, 1985)

In the early 1980's, Masano Toda proposed that emotions be envisioned as a setf rational survival programs, specifically tailored through evolution so as to provide thenisms with the opportunity to handle critical situations in reasonable time. To renderse ideas more concrete, Toda created the concept of "fungus eaters", imaginary animats tont in space for unanium mining. He further proposed to design them with a set of "urges", which he defined as "built­in motivational subroutines for making decisions andxecuting the chosen action plan". Most of the urges proposed happened to be of social nature. Although this theoretical proposal proved interesting and stimulating, one nevertheless feels some uneasiness with aspects of the structure and with certain of the urgesied. Thus some of them, like startle or hunger, should probably not be considered asine emotions; besides, all the urges specified in the model do not stand at the sameonceptual level, some being more behavioral, and some more abstract. The article then presents briefly Aubé's theory of "emotions­as­commitment­operators", which shows striking similarities with Toda's system of urges. The article concludes by stressing how thet of commitment as second­order resource could help simplify Toda's proposal, andclarify the whole domain of emotions.