On potential cognitive abilities in the machine kingdom

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11023-012-9299-6Animals, including humans, are usually judged on what they could become, rather than what they are. Many physical and cognitive abilities in the ‘animal kingdom’ are only acquired (to a given degree) when the subject reaches a certain stage of development, which can be accelerated or spoilt depending on how the environment, training or education is. The term ‘potential ability’ usually refers to how quick and likely the process of attaining the ability is. In principle, things should not be different for the ‘machine kingdom’. While machines can be characterised by a set of cognitive abilities, and measuring them is already a big challenge, known as ‘universal psychometrics’, a more informative, and yet more challenging, goal would be to also determine the potential cognitive abilities of a machine. In this paper we investigate the notion of potential cognitive ability for machines, focussing especially on universality and intelligence. We consider several machine characterisations (non-interactive and interactive) and give definitions for each case, considering permanent and temporal potentials. From these definitions, we analyse the relation between some potential abilities, we bring out the dependency on the environment distribution and we suggest some ideas about how potential abilities can be measured. Finally, we also analyse the potential of environments at different levels and briefly discuss whether machines should be designed to be intelligent or potentially intelligent.We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments, which have helped to significantly improve this paper. This work was supported by the MEC-MINECO projects CONSOLIDER-INGENIO CSD2007-00022 and TIN 2010-21062-C02-02, GVA project PROMETEO/2008/051, the COST - European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research IC0801 AT. Finally, we thank three pioneers ahead of their time(s). We thank Ray Solomonoff (1926-2009) and Chris Wallace (1933-2004) for all that they taught us, directly and indirectly. And, in his centenary year, we thank Alan Turing (1912-1954), with whom it perhaps all began.Hernández-Orallo, J.; Dowe, DL. (2013). On potential cognitive abilities in the machine kingdom. Minds and Machines. 23(2):179-210. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-012-9299-6S179210232Amari, S., Fujita, N., Shinomoto, S. (1992). Four types of learning curves. Neural Computation 4(4), 605–618.Aristotle (Translation, Introduction, and Commentary by Ross, W.D.) (1924). Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Barmpalias, G. & Dowe, D. L. (2012). 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A macroscopic analytical model of collaboration in distributed robotic systems

In this article, we present a macroscopic analytical model of collaboration in a group of reactive robots. The model consists of a series of coupled differential equations that describe the dynamics of group behavior. After presenting the general model, we analyze in detail a case study of collaboration, the stick-pulling experiment, studied experimentally and in simulation by Ijspeert et al. [Autonomous Robots, 11, 149-171]. The robots' task is to pull sticks out of their holes, and it can be successfully achieved only through the collaboration of two robots. There is no explicit communication or coordination between the robots. Unlike microscopic simulations (sensor-based or using a probabilistic numerical model), in which computational time scales with the robot group size, the macroscopic model is computationally efficient, because its solutions are independent of robot group size. Analysis reproduces several qualitative conclusions of Ijspeert et al.: namely, the different dynamical regimes for different values of the ratio of robots to sticks, the existence of optimal control parameters that maximize system performance as a function of group size, and the transition from superlinear to sublinear performance as the number of robots is increased

Tailoring temporal description logics for reasoning over temporal conceptual models

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