Growing up virtual : the computational lessons of development

Cognitive development is one of nature's most important mechanisms for creating robustly adaptive intelligent creatures. From felids to oscines, developing animals are capable of learning in adverse environments with a reliability that often outpaces the current state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence (AI) The purpose of this thesis, therefore, is to examine how insights from cognitive development might be applied to the design of AI architectures. Starting with a targeted review of the ethological literature, I identify the key computational lessons of development, the fundamental conceptual insights that suggest intriguing new strategies for behavioral organization. These insights are then employed in the design of a developmental behavior architecture in which a hierarchical motivation-based behavior system is coupled to a distributed set of domain-specific learning tools. The architecture is deployed in a synthetic character (Hektor the mouse) whose challenge is to learn to play a competitive card matching game successfully against a human user. Evaluation of Hektor's performance on this task, at both qualitative and quantitative levels of description, reveal that the developmental architecture is capable of surmounting complex learning objectives in a novel and efficient manner. I conclude that the architecture presented here represents a valuable starting point for further consideration of developmental design principles.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Lyons, Derek Eugen

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bruce M. Blumberg.

• Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/17824

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/17824