I wrote:
I just had a notion. The proper sensory input and motor output for an AI is
the computer screen (and sound input and regular keyboard and mouse input).
One thing that needs to exist is a freely available standard API for these
things, so people can work on them, plus implementations for the platforms
that people use. My hope is that it would give different researchers,
especially all those lone wolves out there, something intercompatible to
work
with. It also seems possible that this could be a common mechanism for the
different systems to
work together, in a sort of extension of the Blackboard model. And, as a
lighter element of it, I'd really like it if these projects could use video
games, because they more and more have become very sophisticated real-world
modelling tools.
andi
And Richard Loosemore asked for clarification:
Can you be more specific about what this would entail? I can think
of several interpretations of what you say, but am not sure which
you mean.
Well, if you can think of several interpretations, then why don't you pick one
you like?
I was thinking along the lines of java.awt.Robot. I only had a vague
recollection of it, and I never used it, and looking at it again now, I think
it is exactly what I was thinking of. Another reason I thought of it is that
Stan Franklin's Ida model uses e-mail as a sort of sensory-motor and that's a
kind of subset of this notion. It seems like the standard reactions people
have when they wonder what an artificial intelligence is going to do is either
sit in a box and answer questions or control a physical robot clunking around
the world. I would simply propose that one other useful answer is to control
and use a computer the way a person might control a computer. This would mean
that it could use all manner of existing tools to multiply whatever power its
additional intelligence adds.
But one of the tricky bits of the idea is having something sufficiently
general and useful enough to make a contribution. As I mentioned, there is a
Java class that does the kind of thing I'm interested in. And it's probably
straightforward to have this kind of thing in other imperative languages. But
how would you have a neural network system interface to it? I don't know,
maybe the API idea is foolish. I've never tried to design one, so I don't
particularly know what's involved or if it's even a good idea. The really
basic functions I would expect are an ability to capture a piece of the
screen, to control the mouse, and input keyboard events. I think a very
valuable addition would be to discover a character (or piece of text) that's
at a particular location, so reading in text from a screen would be easier.
We have to do this to use a computer and any agent using a computer would need
to do this anyway, so it would be just more useful to add that in at the
beginning. Unfortunately, that could be a tricky bit of code, but it is miles
away from OCR, so it isn't unreasonable. I also mentioned having access to
the sound streams. People can get away with not using the sound on a
computer, so clearly it wouldn't be necessary for an artificial agent using it
to use it, but it might make a valuable addition. And it might a useful
feature if part of this interface enabled an AI to simply watch what a person
(or conceivably another agent) was doing, which could open opportunities for
some kind of instruction or learning.
andi
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