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).

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Ernest 9.1 gathers pollen into the hive

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Ernest 9.1 is similar to Ernest 9.0 but the bee has some new ways to interact with singularities in the environment. As before, she must visit a singularity to know what possibilities of interaction this singularity offers to her.

The violet square now represents the nest where she would gather the pollen. Colored squares are low landmarks that she can fly over, except the turquoise square that is the wall corner into which she would bump. As before, blue squares are flowers from which she can collect pollen.

Steps 0-60: initial phase of sensorymotor contingencies learning (as discussed before). She finds the nest on step 17, then continues exploring.
Step 98: she finds the first pollen.
Steps 99-163: she fumbles back to the nest.
Steps 163: she drops the pollen into the nest.
Steps 165-275: a second gathering cycle where she is still fumbling on her way back to the nest.
Steps 278-363: the third gathering cycle. This time, she finds the direct way back to the nest.
Steps 364-600: she explores the second flower field and adapts her way back to the nest.

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