Centauri's Thoughts

After doing MUCH reading last weekend on many papers from Marvin Minsky I have not only gone back to a previous 10 year old design of multiple controllers, but I also got a few interesting ideas about the higher areas closer to thought, goals, and ultimately, AI someday.

First the hardware: Although I will still use the Jack Rabbit board for the high level processing and navigation, I am going to use one or more Basic Stamps for the Body control. In essence, all motor control, Ultrasonic distance measuring, Light sensors, shaft encoders, camera, anything having to do with the physical world, shall happen at the stamp level. the stamp itself will talk to more processors, as the serial H-Bridge, SSC servo control and CMU cam all have their own dedicated processors.

By doing this, the main processor is now not only free to do higher level things only, but must now tell the "body" what to do, and the body must perform it. This allows the "body" to have reactions that the high level mind isn't even quite aware of right away. Things like a sudden light level change, or sudden loud noise, or an obstacle that suddenly appears.

In fact, I plan to take advantage of this in a few ways, one of which is sudden loud noises causes a quick scurrying for the dark.

The other thing that all this reading has brought to me is something new in code, and that is, the concept of goals. All bots have goals of some kind built into them, but usually they are built with a single goal in mind, like solve a maze, or find or avoid an object. Some have a few "modes" or operating preferences.

The concept here is to have an initial "list" of goals, and each is associated with a number (a weight, so to speak), they start at zero (lowest goal) and I set only 2 at the beginning of the program to have any value at all, and that is "seek light" and "seek movement". When things happen in the body, these goals and others can be altered, for instance, one goal is "go feed" (recharge) and the battery level drives this one.. as the levels of charge get lower, this goal becomes more and more important. Another set of goals are run away from light (opposite of seek), and this is driven by sharp, sudden sounds. The response to this becomes less and less if it happens often, so the idea is to become de-sensitized to all that noise if its a common thing. We shall see how that one works out, it should prove interesting just as an item for study.

Some Other goals are run from movement, and this is in case its following something, and then that thing turns on him, or something else approaches too fast. This too, is part of a skiddish behaviour, but one which might be a good survival skill. Explore is a goal as well, and if the world is not perceived as dangerous, then this goal will have a decent precedence.

Hopefully, some of this will get tested out in the coming month or so, as I still have hardware work to do.