EM-ONE : an architecture for reflective commonsense thinking

Abstract

This thesis describes EM-ONE, an architecture for commonsense thinking capable of reflective reasoning about situations involving physical, social, and mental dimensions. EM-ONE uses as its knowledge base a library of commonsense narratives, each describing the physical, social, and mental activity that occurs during an interaction between several actors. EM-ONE reasons with these narratives by applying "mental critics," procedures that debug problems that exist in the outside world or within EM- ONE itself. Mental critics draw upon commonsense narratives to suggest courses of action, methods for deliberating about the circumstances and consequences of those actions, and--when things go wrong-ways to reflect upon and debug the activity of previously invoked mental critics. Mental critics are arranged into six layers, the reactive, deliberative, reflective, self-reflective, self-conscious, and self-ideals layers. The selection of mental critics within these six layers is itself guided by a separate collection of meta-level critics that recognize what overall problem-type presently confronts the system. EM-ONE was developed and tested within an artificial life domain where simulated robotic actors face concrete physical and social problems.

(cont.) A detailed scenario is presented where EM-ONE enables two such actors to work together to build a table by engaging reactive, deliberative, and reflective processes operating across the physical, social, and mental realms.