Transcript [Slides]

Agents in the Society of Mind
EEL 6938
William Walters
The Society of the Mind
• Marvin Minsky
– M.I.T. Professor
– A.I., cognitive psychology, mathematics
– Common sense reasoning
• Book
– Concept of how the mind works
– Organization of book
Agents and Agencies
• Mind is made up of many small processes,
each small process is an agent
• Agents have no intelligence
• Agents can only do simple task
• An agency is many agents put together
• Agencies appear to have intelligence
Cup of tea
• Agents
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Grasping
Balancing
Thirst
Moving
• Millions of things going on and no one
thinks about them
Common Sense
• Making machines do common sense tasks
are the most difficult
• Children learn common sense early
– Don’t use same block
– What if tower sways
• Is tower too tall
• Is foundation insecure
• Was last block placed too roughly
Blocks
• Why Blocks
• 1960’s built builder
Conflict
• Conflicts go to higher agents and weaken them
Reward
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Snarc, maze and predator
Couldn’t solve complicated problems
Only learn last steps before reward
Reinforcement learning not for complicated
problems
• Beavers and dams
Memory
• K-Lines
• Bicycle example
Knowledge-Tree
• Jack is flying his kite
Emotion
• Can intelligent machines have emotion?
• Can machines be intelligent without
emotions?
• Thoughts and emotions intertwined
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Anger
Thirst
Hunger
Fear
Language Agency
• Agents
– Polynemes – long-term memories
– Isonomes – short-term memories
Ambiguity
• I wrote a note to my sister.
– Comment
– Banknote
– Musical Sound
• The astronomer married the star.
• John shot two bucks.
Old Agents and New Agents
• Old agents know less than new ones
• Old agents are the foundation the new
• Losing old agents
Confusion of Agents
References
Minsky, Marvin. The Society of the Mind, Simon and Schuster, New
York 1985.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/