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, November 29, 2011

Ernest 10.5

Ernest 10.5 has social drives. He loves cuddling with other Ernests.

See the 3D demo here (better with Chrome).

Ernest 10.5 is similar to Ernest 10.4 except that he constructs bundles to represent other Ernests. These bundles become attractive when he discovers that he can cuddle with other Ernests (same principle as with food).

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Ernest 10.4

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Ernest 10.4 has an improved local-space memory and an improved bundle construction mechanism (see our discussion on bundles here).

On step 188, there is no more fish within the range of Ernest's vision nor within its tactile perception, but Ernest is still aware of the presence of a fish behind him. His local-space awareness makes him turn back towards that fish.

Note that Ernest's spatial awareness is still local: when he is in the lower part of the board, he is unaware of the presence of fish in the upper part of the board.

(Video also available on YouTube)

Friday, November 4, 2011

Ernest in NetLogo

Please click here to try the demonstration of Ernest 8 in NetLogo. This demonstration was developed by  Ilias Sakellariou with the University of Macedonia.

We kept Ernest's algorithm in Java. We developed a NetLog extension to access Ernest's java algorithm from within NetLogo. We called this extension IMOS (Intrinsic MOtivation System). Like the Ernest algorithm, IMOS is open source. We are happy to share it and provide all necessary support.

IMOS allows you to easily include environment-agnostic intrinsically motivated agents in your NetLogo models.