Rapid trial-and-error learning with simulation supports flexible tool use and physical reasoning
Name
29302.full.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.15 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4a95f320fd94ed82b5787551c536b91a
Author(s)
Allen, Kelsey R
Smith, Kevin A
Tenenbaum, Joshua B
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2020 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Many animals, and an increasing number of artificial agents, display sophisticated capabilities to perceive and manipulate objects. But human beings remain distinctive in their capacity for flexible, creative tool use-using objects in new ways to act on the world, achieve a goal, or solve a problem. To study this type of general physical problem solving, we introduce the Virtual Tools game. In this game, people solve a large range of challenging physical puzzles in just a handful of attempts. We propose that the flexibility of human physical problem solving rests on an ability to imagine the effects of hypothesized actions, while the efficiency of human search arises from rich action priors which are updated via observations of the world. We instantiate these components in the "sample, simulate, update" (SSUP) model and show that it captures human performance across 30 levels of the Virtual Tools game. More broadly, this model provides a mechanism for explaining how people condense general physical knowledge into actionable, task-specific plans to achieve flexible and efficient physical problem solving.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1912341117
