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, February 9, 2011

Ernest 8.3 The Ernestor

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Ernest 8.3 is the same as Ernest 8.2; only the interface with his environment has changed.

Ernest 8.3's turning actions make him turn PI/4 rather than PI/2 before. Accordingly, Ernest 8.3 can now move forward in diagonal. Also, Ernest 8.3's eyes have a narrower angular span of PI/8 each (rather than PI/2 with Ernest 8.2).

These settings require a longer learning phase than before because of the topological differences between diagonals and straight lines, and because of the reduced visual field that implies more complex behaviors to find the targets. The fact that the same Ernest algorithm can learn to deal with these different settings demonstrates again the algorithm's robustness.

This example video shows that Ernest is now a pretty serious predator in the grid world. We call him Ernestor-Rex or e-Rex. As opposed to poor Ernest 8.2, The Ernestor-Rex does not get trapped into infinite loops between preys. See step 330 and further. This is because his narrow visual field makes him take care of a single prey at a time.

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