Mystery Number Five - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 89

6. Mystery Number Five:
Learning

The wide variety of DBS grammar rules and DBS inferences described so
far would be of limited use if they had all to be defined and adjusted by
hand. Therefore, the fifth mystery of natural communication is how to model
(i) adaptation during evolution in phylogenesis and ontogenesis, including
language acquisition, and (ii) learning as an improvement of the agent's sur-
vival skills in a changing environment.

6.1 Fixed Behavior Agents

The phylogenetic and ontogenetic evolutions of an agent's cognition begins
with fixed behavior, based on the fixed action patterns ( FAP s) of ethology
(Campbell 1996). As an abstract example consider an agent which can per-
ceive no more than three external stimuli, namely a red, a green, and a blue
light (recognition), and can perform no more than three kinds of external mo-
tion, namely straight, left, and right (action). Furthermore, a red light trig-
gers a straight, left, right, straight, right, left sequence, a green light triggers
a straight, left, straight, left, straight, left sequence, and a blue light triggers a
straight, right, straight, right, straight, right sequence. Without going into the
angle, length, etc., of each kind of step, a graphical representation of these
action sequences may be shown roughly as follows:

6.1.1 M OTION PATTERNS OF A FIXED BEHAVIOR AGENT

red green blue