Posts in 1996-1992
The Design of Learning for an Artifact (postscript)

Joanna Bryson, from the AISB96 workshop on Learning in Robots and Animals. (There's also an older, longer version about Cog.)

Learning in animals seems to be highly specialized and constrained as much as possible, primarily to things that cannot be learned in evolutionary time scales. As developers of behavior-based AI, we largely take on the role of evolutionary learning ourselves. Our robots or avatars should only have the special-purpose sorts of learning built-in to their everyday actions.

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The Use of State in Intelligent Control (postscript) [Draft]

Joanna Bryson, 1995.

This short paper compares Shakey and Genghis, and demonstrates the necessity of using control state even in the simplest reactive system. I’m not sure anyone cares enough for me to ever get this one published! But I still think it could be useful for some people. (The original Genghis didn’t actually back up and turn when it bumped into something with a feeler. It just lifted its leg higher. Ooops. Oh well, the same arguments still all apply. The behavior I described was on the commercial version of Genghis available then from ISR (now iRobot)).

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The Reactive Accompanist: Applying Subsumption Architecture to Software Design

Edinburgh University Department of AI tech report 606, 1992.

This paper is temporarily (January 2003) inaccessible due to the Edinburgh fire. Since ‘temporary’ has lasted for over two years, here’s a draft version I still had the latex for. Compares Subsumption Architecture with Object-Oriented Design in the context of my MSc. Draft was last modified around November 1992, it was placed here March 2005.

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