Dynamic Imputation of Agent Cognition

People can interact much more readily with a multi-agent system if they can understand it in cognitive terms. Modern work on “BDI agents” emphasizes explicit representation of cognitive attributes in the design and construction of a single agent, but transferring these concepts to a community is not straightforward. In addition, there are single-agent cases in which this approach cannot yield the desired perspicuity, including fine-grained agents without explicit internal representation of cognitive attributes, and agents whose inner structures are not accessible. We draw together two vintage lines of agent research to address this problem: the perspective that cognition can legitimately be imputed externally to a system irrespective of its internal structure, and the insight from situated automata that dynamical systems offer a well-defined semantics for cognition. We demonstrate this approach in both single agent and multi agent examples.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: H. Van Dyke Parunak, Sven Brueckner
• Keywords: ATAL 2003, Cognitive Attributes, Explicit Internal Representation, Single Agent