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scijones

I like to write highly speculative AI and CS ideas.

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hopefully you'd implement metacognition as cognition about cognition, right?

scijones 3/24/2024

For this one, I'm talking about the Soar Cognitive Architecture as AI engineering software, and not so much about it in relation to humans. This software attempts to support cognition. Core to this is a procedural memory that breaks decision making into phases. At least every 50ms, the architecture goes through the phases of 1) proposing different options for (changes to) its actions, selecting among those options, and determining how to actually do the thing it selected. Those are called “propose, decide, apply”. That's the core loop of how Soar implements cognition. Each of these phases are implemented as part of the architecture, but the specifics of how a particular agent proceeds through those phases depends on the knowledge it has. For example, let's consider an agent navigating a maze and pretend the agent hits an intersection. One way the agent could “propose” is it could propose movement to each branch at the intersection. What to “select”?

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Spreading activation, a quaint and useful cogsci AI idea

scijones 2/27/2024

Some older cogsci AI ideas can seem quaint in the modern AI practice. One of those that is still relevant, but just plain simple in the face of modern models, is spreading activation. Imagine modeling human knowledge literally as a labeled directed graph. You can actually model some interesting aspects of human cognition with simple algorithms defined over such a graph. Spreading activation is that kind of thing. There was this notion that we could implement semantic memory knowledge with a graph. Imagine embodied concepts of colors as nodes, words also being separate nodes, and edges that also have labels connecting things together. So, you could have a mental representation of “red” the color, an associated name for the color that is actually the string “red”, and an edge from the actual color concept to the string label called “label” or “name”. We're talking that level of just throwing things into a graph and saying “sure, that'

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thinking about parallel computing for thinking

scijones 2/7/2024

Soar is a “cognitive architecture”. It attempts to implement the necessary components to support general intelligence, but it's not like crypto/AI/techbro hype. It's a decades long academic research project, and it has been useful for some robotics and cognitive modeling. Soar is single core. With increasing availability of parallel computing, it may seem odd that an architecture that attempts to implement the basis for intelligence is largely single core. While aspects of our code-base could be parallelized for some performance gain, it seems that some serial bottleneck is inescapable and appears humanlike, at least for complex decision-making. This got me wondering whether underlying constraints could exist to demand that this must be the case. This led me to thinking about a swarm intelligence and about whether an intelligence embodied in a swarm would face the same constraints. From what I can tell, in such an intelligence, you would want the distributed knowledge in th

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