Mike, I've printed but not yet fully studied the Barsalou paper. But I am still very comforted by your quotation from his work:
... he posits as primary something more like 2) an "agent-dependent instruction manual. According to this metaphor, knowledge of a category is not a general description of its members. Instead a skill that delivers highly specialized packages of inferences to guide an agent's interactions with specific category members in particular situations. Across different situations, different packages tailor inferences to different goals and situational constraints." I am OK with this, for not only does Texai have agents decomposed into skills, but Texai is planned to be a large number of distributed agents situated in a hierarchical control system. Agents will share relevant portions of the same ontology but their conceptual category members will indeed be different, i.e. specialized to their particular requirements. Each agent will possess cached portions of the various distributed partitions of the Texai knowledge base. In my view this design does not incorporate a database of generalized categorical knowledge that is relatively detached from the goals of specific agents. In contrast to Cyc, in which crisp symbolic facts, rules and query answering are paramount, Texai will have skill acquisition as paramount. And I mean any skill which can be composed of sub-skills bottoming out in executable code with real-world actuators and sensors. The scripts that define these skills are to be stored in the agent-local knowledge base in the same manner as any set of agent-local facts, permitting reflective manipulation by Texai. Some time before the end of this year the bootstrap English dialog system should be available to interact with volunteer mentors. Perhaps you can propose some experiments at that point to demonstrate its shortcomings with respect to the point you are making. -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
