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Thursday, December 19, 2019

Emergent AI by Minimizing Chaos

Article is ultimately quite technical, but the basic proposal is interesting.   A way to predict, measure, drive particular goals that lead to behaviors?    Intriguing direction.

Emergent Behavior by Minimizing Chaos

BY Glen Berseth   Dec 18, 2019   Berkeley AI Blog

All living organisms carve out environmental niches within which they can maintain relative predictability amidst the ever-increasing entropy around them (1), (2). Humans, for example, go to great lengths to shield themselves from surprise — we band together in millions to build cities with homes, supplying water, food, gas, and electricity to control the deterioration of our bodies and living spaces amidst heat and cold, wind and storm. The need to discover and maintain such surprise-free equilibria has driven great resourcefulness and skill in organisms across very diverse natural habitats. Motivated by this, we ask: could the motive of preserving order amidst chaos guide the automatic acquisition of useful behaviors in artificial agents?

How might an agent in an environment acquire complex behaviors and skills with no external supervision? This central problem in artificial intelligence has evoked several candidate solutions, largely focusing on novelty-seeking behaviors (3), (4), (5). In simulated worlds, such as video games, novelty-seeking intrinsic motivation can lead to interesting and meaningful behavior. However, these environments may be fundamentally lacking compared to the real world. In the real world, natural forces and other agents offer bountiful novelty. Instead, the challenge in natural environments is allostasis: discovering behaviors that enable agents to maintain an equilibrium (homeostasis), for example to preserve their bodies, their homes, and avoid predators and hunger. In the example below we shown an example where an agent is experiencing random events due to the changing weather. If the agent learns to build a shelter, in this case a house, the agent will reduce the observed effects from weather  .... "

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