Abstract
In this article, I present a software architecture for intelligent agents. The essence of AI is complex information processing. It is impossible, in principle, to process complex information as a whole. We need some partial processing strategy that is still somehow connected to the whole. We also need flexible processing that can adapt to changes in the environment. One of the candidates for both of these is situated reasoning, which makes use of the fact that an agent is in a situation, so it only processes some of the information – the part that is relevant to that situation. The combination of situated reasoning and context reflection leads to the idea of organic programming, which introduces a new building block of programs called a cell. Cells contain situated programs and the combination of cells is controlled by those programs.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Barwise, J. (1989), The Situation in Logic. CSLI Lecture Notes, No. 17, Stanford, California.
Barwise, J. and Perry, J. (1983), Situations and Attitudes. Cambridge, MIT Press, MA.
Barwise, J. and Seligman, J. (1997), Information Flow: The Logic of Distributed Systems. Cambridge Univ. Press.
Bertalanffy, L. (1968), General System Theory. New York, George Braziller.
Borota, J., Frank, M., Itoh, A., Nakashima, H., Peters, S., Reilly, M. and Schütze H. (1992), The PROSIT language v1.0. Technical report, CSLI.
Brooks, R.A., (1991), ‘Intelligence Without Representation’; Artificial Intelligence, 47: 139–160.
Devlin, K., (1991), Logic and Information I: Infons and Situations. Univ. Press, Cambridge. Cooperative architecture project team. Gaea home page. http://cape.etl.go.jp/gaea/, 1996.
Hasida, K. and Matsubara, H., (1990), ‘Partiality of Information and the Structure of the Frame Problem’. In Proc. of Pacific Rim International Conf. on AI 90, pps. 711–716.
Havel, I.M. (1993), ‘Artificial Thought and Emergent Mind’. In Proc. of International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 93, pps 758–766.
Kimura, B. (1994), Kokoro-no Byori-wo Kangaeru (In Japanese. Considerations on Mental Malfunction). Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.
Kitano, H., Asada, M., Kuniyoshi, Y., Noda, I., Osawa, E., and Matsubara, H. (1997), Robocup-a challenge problem for AI-. AI Magazine, 18(1): 73–85, spring.
LeDoux, J.E., Cicchetti, P., Xagorais, A. and Romanski, L.M. (1990), ‘The Lateral Amygdaloid Nucleus: Sensory Interface of the Amygdala in Fear Conditioning’. The Journal of Neuroscience, 10(4): 1062–1069, April.
Matsumoto, G., Shigematsu, Y. and Ichikawa, M. (1996), ‘The Brain as a Computer’. In Roberto Moreno-Díaz and José Mira-Mira, (eds), Brain Processes, Theories and Models, pps 107–112. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Matsuno, K. (1996), ‘A View from the Inside’. Revue de la Pensee d'Aujour d'Hui, 24(11): 79–92. in Japanese. English version available at http://bio.nagaokaut.ac.jp/_matsuno/VIEW96.htm.
Maturana, H.R. and Varela, F.J. (1980), Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht, Holland, D. Reidel Publishing Co.
Minsky, M. (1975), ‘A Framework for Representing Knowledge’. In Patric Winston, editor, The Psychology of Computer Vision. McGraw Hill.
Nakashima, H. (1992), Context reflection. In Proc. of IMSA '92 International Workshop on Reflection and Meta-Level Architecture, pages 172–177.
Nakashima, H. and Noda, I. (1998), ‘Dynamic Subsumption Architecture for Programming Intelligent Agents’. In Proc. of International Conf. on Multi-Agent Systems 98. AAAI Press. 80
Nakashima, H., Noda, I. and Handa, K. (1996), ‘Organic Programming Language Gaea for Multiagents’. In Proc. of International Conf. on Multi-Agent Systems 96, pages 236–243. AAAI Press.
Nakashima, H. and Osawa, I. (1996), ‘Inference with Mental Situations’. In Proc. of the Second Conf. on Information-Theoretic Approaches to Logic, Language, and Computation, pages 153–166.
Nakashima, H., Peters, S. and Schüzte, H. (1991), ‘Communication and Inference through Situations’. In Proc. of IJCAI-91, pages 76–81.
Nakashima, H. and Tutiya, S. (1991), ‘Inference in a Situation about Situations’. In Situation Theory and its Applications, 2, pages 215–227. CSLI Lecture Notes, No. 26, Stanford, California.
Rosenschein, S.J. (1987), ‘Formal Theories of Knowledge in AI and Robotics’. Report 87–84, CSLI, Stanford University, California.
Rössler, O.E. (1987), ‘Endophysics’. In John L. Casti and Anders Karlqvit, editors, Real Brains Artificial Minds. Elsevier Science Publishing Co. Inc.
Russell, S. (1995), ‘Rationality and Intelligence’. In Proc. of IJCAI-95, pages 950–957.
Simon, H. (1995), ‘Explaining the Ineffable: AI on the Topics of Intuition, Insight and Inspiration’. In Proc. of IJCAI-95, pages 939–948.
Stone, P. and Veloso, M. (1998), ‘Task Decomposition and Dynamic Role Assignment for Real-Time Strategic Teamwork’. In Proc. of ATAL '98-Agents, Theories, Architectures, and Languages, pages 369–381.
Tinbergen, N. (1951), The Study of Instinct. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Ueda, K. (1987), Guarded Horn Clauses. In Eiiti Wada, editor, Logic Programming '85, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 221. Springer-Verlag, 1986. Also in Concurrent Prolog: Collected Papers, Vol. 1, Shapiro E. (ed.), Cambridge, MA. The MIT Press, pp. 140–156.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Nakashima, H. AI as Complex Information Processing. Minds and Machines 9, 57–80 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008322730047
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008322730047