The Artificial Life Route to Artificial Intelligence: Building Embodied, Situated Agents

Front Cover
Luc Steels, Rodney Allen Brooks
L. Erlbaum Associates, 1995 - Computers - 288 pages
This volume is the direct result of a conference in which a number of leading researchers from the fields of artificial intelligence and biology gathered to examine whether there was any ground to assume that a new AI paradigm was forming itself and what the essential ingredients of this new paradigm were. A great deal of scepsis is justified when researchers, particularly in the cognitive sciences, talk about a new paradigm. Shifts in paradigm mean not only new ideas but also shifts in what constitutes good problems, what counts as a result, the experimental practice to validate results, and the technological tools needed to do research. Due to the complexity of the subject matter, paradigms abound in the cognitive sciences -- connectionism being the most prominent newcomer in the mid-1980s.

This workshop group was brought together in order to clarify the common ground, see what had been achieved so far, and examine in which way the research could move further. This volume is a reflection of this important meeting. It contains contributions which were distributed before the workshop but then substantially broadened and revised to reflect the workshop discussions and more recent technical work. Written in polemic form, sometimes criticizing the work done thus far within the new paradigm, this collection includes research program descriptions, technical contributions, and position papers.

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About the author (1995)

Rodney Brooks is Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, & Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science. He is also Chairman & Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp. (Formerly IS Robotics). He was a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University & at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of MIT before joining the Computer Science faculty of Stanford in 1983 & the MIT faculty in 1984. He was a founder of Lucid, Inc. He is also a Founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) & a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was co-founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision & is a member of the editorial boards of various journals, He is a member of the Brain & Cognitive Science Board of MIT Press. His books include Model Based Computer Vision (1984), Programming in Common Lisp (1985).

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