The Cognition and Affect Project: Architectures, Architecture-Schemas, And The New Science of Mind. 1
Aaron Sloman · 2008
Research on algorithms and representations once dominated AI. Recently the importance of architectures has been acknowledged, but researchers have different objectives, presuppositions and conceptual frameworks, and this can lead to confused terminology, argumentation at cross purposes, re-invention of wheels and fragmentation of the research. We propose a methodological framework: develop a general representation of a wide class of architectures within which different architectures can be compared and contrasted. This should facilitate communication and integration across sub-fields of and approaches to AI, as well as providing a framework for evaluating alternative architectures. As a first-draft example we present the CogAff architecture schema, and show how it provides a useful framework for comparing and contrasting a wide range of architectures, including H-Cogaff, a proposed architecture for human-like systems. All of these concern virtual machine architectures whose natural implementations use biological mechanisms but some of which may use products of human engineering. Besides attempting to understand what sorts of virtual machine architectures are possible