Publication
Architecture and Representations
Nick Hawes; Jeremy L. Wyatt; Mohan Sridharan; Henrik Jacobsson; Richard Dearden; Aaron Sloman; Geert-Jan Kruijff
In: Henrik I. Christensen; Geert-Jan Kruijff; Jeremy L. Wyatt. Cognitive Systems. Pages 51-94, Cognitive Systems Monographs (COSMOS), Vol. 8, Springer, 2010.
Abstract
The study of architectures to support intelligent behaviour is certainly the
broadest, and arguably one of the most ill-defined enterprises in AI and Cog-
nitive Science. The basic scientific question we seek to answer is: "What are
the trade-offs between the different ways that intelligent systems might struc-
tured?" These trade-offs depend in large part on what kinds of tasks and
environment a system operates under (niche space), and also what aspects of
the design space we deem to be architectural. In CoSy we have tried to answer
that question in several ways. First by thinking about the requirements on ar-
chitectures that arise from our particular scenarios (parts of niche space). Sec-
ond by building systems that follow well-defined architectural rules, and using
these systems to carry out experiments on variations of those rules. Third by
using the insights from system building to improve our understanding of the
trade-offs between different architectural choices, i.e. between different partial
designs. Our ob jective in CoSy has not been to come up with just another
robot architecture, but instead to try to make some small steps forward in a
new science of architectures.