Short selections from:
- Tooby & Cosmides: Psychological Foundations of Culture.
- Minsky: Computer Science is Not About Computers, Public Lecture, Nara, Japan.
- Minsky: Society of Mind.
- Koza: Design by Darwin, Invention Machine.
- Don'ts of Mathematical Modeling.
Last words on multipe-agency:
We end the readings in this course by asking you how we might bring five important epistemological and theoretical perspectives to bear upon models of interacting agents. Specifically, how would we go about enhancing the "flocking" model with more human like intelligence and behavior? How would we introduce emotions, goals, plans, actions, memory, deception, and different cultural "world views" into our agents' minds? How would we introduce "theory of mind" into our agents. ("Theory of mind" implies that each agent has within its mind a model or simulation of the minds of other agents.) What is universal about computation?
First thoughts on what's to come...
This is a "think piece." Perhaps this would serve as a critical introduction to a graduate course (which we don't have) on Artificial Culture. But I'd like you to keep your thinking as close as possible to the elements of the programming languages that we have used, and the architectures of space and time we have introduced. As much as possible, suggest ways in which we might begin to incorporate these complex functionalities into the agents in our "flocking" simulation.
Think about some specifics in detail. Please describe the processes and algorithms you might wish to use in detail. If possible, block out some pseudocode for your ideas. If you can work out some compilable code for your ideas, then be sure to include that in your course project!
You may find that much of social science theory is NOT directly translatable into multiagent models. So if you'd rather work with your own ideas about human interactions that you've experienced on your own, that is OK too. In fact, working with a situation that you know intimately may well provide you with a rich set of ideas with which to work.