Re: Where is behavior AI now?

dpa wrote:
Let me try again. Musicians have been able to get an infinite
variety of music from the same 12 notes since the time of the
ancient Greeks. The variety and "intelligence" of the music
does not seem to be limited by the limited nature of the "output
resources."

I realize your music analogy is about how M outputs does not necessarily
constrain N results, but I think it works just as well in a larger
picture. To wit:

I find the above analogy doubly interesting because Pythagorean
intervals aren't the only way to play music. There's the pentatonic
scale, which the Greeks based their scale on, which consists of five
notes, a scale every rocker gets to know well, and are identified by the
black keys on the piano. Indian music divides an octave into 22 steps,
and uses only a subset of them. Arabic music has 16 steps, as I recall.

The point is there is more to music than the (two) Pythagorean intervals
and a 12-step scale, and different cultures have created their music
using a variety of tonalities. To me, this is yet another example of how
there can never be one way of doing anything. A Western ear will hear
only 5 or 12 notes to an octave, because that's the music we listen to;
yet there is a whole world of musical differences that have historically
proven themselves to be "tuneful" and enjoyable to other cultures. This
thread serves as ample proof that there is no right (or in my view
wrong) way of approaching robotic programming, whether or not it
includes aspects of behaviorism.

You spoke of a "heretical observation." I have one I'm sure will send me
to hell: personally I find behaviors for many (I didn't say all) tasks
in robotics a dead-end. The formal literature on the subject has all
about ceased; Brooks hasn't written anything new on it, really, since
his original papers some 10 years ago -- his Cambrian Intelligence book
is a reprint of old articles. Could it be that behaviorism is not
capable of all that it is cracked up to be, and the real results can not
sustain the hype?

I base my contrarian observations on my box turtle, Brantley, who has
escaped yet again. Turtles are rather intelligent as far as reptiles go,
but what I saw of Brantley's abilities could be summed up in in one
phrase: "dogged determination and random actions." Every day Brantly
tried the same length of bender board in his quest to see the rest of
the world. He did the same things over and over again. There was no
indication he ever learned that what he did even a minute ago would not
work right now. But it turns out that Brantley was able to escape into
the larger part of our yard (thick with ivy and underbrush) exactly
because he had no memory of what didn't work. As a state machine all it
did was eat and poop. He kept trying a random assortment of things
until, one day, his efforts yielded success.

I'm not saying the ideal robot just goes around doing random acts,
simply because there is NO ideal robot. It seems to me that just as
there is more than one musical scale and an infinite number of ways to
put those tones together, just about everything works to one degree or
another, depending on our application. It seems dubious to argue an
idiometric approach such as behavior AI when the application universe
may be infinite.

-- Gordon
.

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