Olivier Georgeon's research blog—also known as the story of little Ernest, the developmental agent.

Keywords: situated cognition, constructivist learning, intrinsic motivation, bottom-up self-programming, individuation, theory of enaction, developmental learning, artificial sense-making, biologically inspired cognitive architectures, agnostic agents (without ontological assumptions about the environment).

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Ernest, the smallest learning artificial agent in the world


Ernest can only do two things: A or B.
Ernest can only perceive two things: "Yee" or "o-o". That is good, because those are the only two things that his environment can exhibit.
Ernest loves Yees and hates o-os. Will he learn that, in this environment, to get Yees, one must do B?
The answer is in his activity trace. Play it with your speakers on, because Ernest speaks!!
So, Ernest finds his happiness by exploiting the simplest possible regularity in his environment: A makes o-o and B makes Yee.
But what happens if his environment exhibits more complex regularities? That is what we have to study next.

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