Growing up virtual : the computational lessons of development
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56564997-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
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12.49 MB
Format
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Author(s)
Lyons, Derek Eugen
Advisor(s)
Bruce M. Blumberg.
Date Issued
2004
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Cognitive development is one of nature's most important mechanisms for creating robustly adaptive intelligent creatures. From felids to oscines, developing animals are capable of learning in adverse environments with a reliability that often outpaces the current state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence (AI) The purpose of this thesis, therefore, is to examine how insights from cognitive development might be applied to the design of AI architectures. Starting with a targeted review of the ethological literature, I identify the key computational lessons of development, the fundamental conceptual insights that suggest intriguing new strategies for behavioral organization. These insights are then employed in the design of a developmental behavior architecture in which a hierarchical motivation-based behavior system is coupled to a distributed set of domain-specific learning tools. The architecture is deployed in a synthetic character (Hektor the mouse) whose challenge is to learn to play a competitive card matching game successfully against a human user. Evaluation of Hektor's performance on this task, at both qualitative and quantitative levels of description, reveal that the developmental architecture is capable of surmounting complex learning objectives in a novel and efficient manner. I conclude that the architecture presented here represents a valuable starting point for further consideration of developmental design principles.
Description
Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2004.
Page 205 blank.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [197]-204).
Subjects
Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.
MIT Department
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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