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Over the last week or
so I’ve found John’s comments on Whole and Parts
(and boundaries) an interesting integration of some topics I knew only a
smattering about and in a disconnected way. In John’s discussion of natural vs. fiat boundaries he exposed
some implicit assumptions. Others have suggested the problem of
associating a boundary with just a physical boundary (e.g. a state border, a
membrane or skin). Some of the time this is inappropriate, and not what we mean. Boundaries, like part-whole
relations can be seen in a much broader context beyond a purely
physical interpretation as in the state boundary by fiat. In order to go beyond
the naive interpretation of a boundary as a physical object one can ask for the
boundary’s function. I’d like to add
a few simple ideas to the most recent exchange with Murray Altheim on his
skepticism about
claims of what others think about boundaries. The context was people’s informal
discussion of boundaries using natural language. John
noted >I have no real data
about people talking about boundaries, It
seemed to me that one area where we do have applications that get at actual,
pragmatic concepts of “boundaries” is in robotics. Traditional robotics has explored a
variety of techniques to establish perceptual and motor competence in
negotiating the world. We get to
test out various ideas for perceiving bounded objects (walls etc.). One emerging area called
epigenetic robotics offers some promise of providing some more objective
data about what concepts underlie boundary concepts. Epigenetic robotics combines
developmental psychology and traditional robotics to show ongoing development of behavior
in robotic systems.
Epigenetic robotics takes inspiration from developmental psychology, but
instead of modeling the surface behaviors of infants, it focuses on, for
example, modeling the causal mechanisms and variables underlying the development
of those behaviors. So rather than starting with computational approaches to say
visual segmentation it utilizes psychological development as the” task domain
for designing the robot and its software control architecture” . An example of
this work is to design a robot that learns to improve its target-oriented
reaching based on initially having 2 things - an accurate visual target fixation
mechanism, and a reaching reflex. The robot’s reaching reflex, is based on
something we see in children, an Asymmetric Tonic Neck Reflex to generate an
extension of the robot’s arm, roughly in the direction of the robot’s head turn.
The robot’s eye-gaze fixation control mechanism, separately tuned and not
learned in this context, then develops to control the robot’s head in order to
accurately fixate on an object. In this way we have a method to have the robot
learn to improve its target-oriented reaching proceeded in a series of steps.
Here’s
how it is described in a recent summary article (Core Concepts in Epigenetic
Robotics) by Christopher Prince, Nathan A. Helder, Eric J.
Mislivec, & George J. Hollich The goal is to “specify
the overall organization for constructing the epigenetic robot, and include
architectures relating to specific ontogenetic design and generic
ontogenetic design. In specific ontogenetic design,
close use is made of knowledge of causal mechanisms and
variables from psychological development. In generic
ontogenetic design, the goal is to
provide an ongoing emergence of behaviors in
unstructured environments with less
dependence on knowledge of psychological
development.”… “A key, we think, lies
in viewing development as a task
domain. Normally, as computer scientists and engineers, when we build a
system, we think of specific task requirements and construct the system to fit
those requirements... For example, in constructing a computer-vision system to
detect and recognize objects, we may depend on the fact that the task has
non-occluded objects, perhaps with specific colors, against a neutral colored
background ... In the case of an ongoing emergence of behavior, we need to
reshape our thinking about design. No longer are we striving towards task-specific design, rather we
are engaging in ontogenetic design. We are designing systems that
develop, and that have ongoing emerging behaviors. That is, our domain is now
psychological development itself.” |