Learning by learning to communicate

Human intelligence is a product of cooperation among many different specialists. Much of this cooperation must be learned, but we do not yet have a mechanism that explains how this might happen for the "high-level" agile cooperation that permeates our daily lives. I propose that the various specialists learn to cooperate by learning to communicate, basing this proposal on the phenomenon of communication bootstrapping, in which shared experiences form a basis for agreement on a system of signals. In this dissertation, I lay out a roadmap for investigating this hypothesis, identifying problems that must be overcome in order to understand the capabilities of communication bootstrapping and in order to test whether it is exploited by human intelligence. I then demonstrate progress along the course of investigation laid out in my roadmap: * I establish a measure of developmental cost that allows me to eliminate many possible designs * I develop a method of engineering devices for use in models of intelligence, including characterizing their behavior under a wide variety of conditions and compensating for their misbehavior using failure simplification. * I develop mechanisms that reliably produce communication bootstrapping such that it can be used to connect specialists in an engineered system. * I construct a demonstration system including a simulated world and pair of observers that learn world dynamics via communication bootstrapping.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Beal, Jacob Stuart Michael

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gerald Jay Sussman.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

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/1721.1/42056

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/42056