Understanding intelligence

"Researchers now agree that intelligence always manifests itself in behavior - thus it is behavior that we must understand. An exciting new field has grown around the study of behavior-based intelligence, also known as embodied cognitive science, "new AI," and "behavior-based AI."" "Rolf Pfeifer and Christian Scheier provide a systematic introduction to this new way of thinking about intelligence and computers. After discussing concepts and approaches such as subsumption architecture, Braitenberg vehicles, evolutionary robotics, artificial life, self-organization, and learning, the authors derive a set of principles and a coherent framework for the study of naturally and artificially intelligent systems, or autonomous agents. This framework is based on a synthetic methodology whose goal is understanding by designing and building."--Jacket. Read more... Content: The Study of Intelligence--Foundations and Issues -- The Study of Intelligence -- Characterizing Intelligence -- Studying Intelligence: The Synthetic Approach -- Foundations of Classical Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science -- Cognitive Science: Preliminaries -- The Cognitivistic Paradigm -- An Architecture for an Intelligent Agent -- The Fundamental Problems of Classical Al and Cognitive Science -- Real Worlds versus Virtual Worlds -- Some Well-Known Problems with Classical Systems -- The Fundamental Problems of Classical Al -- Remedies and Alternatives -- A Framework for Embodied Cognitive Science -- Embodied Cognitive Science: Basic Concepts -- Complete Autonomous Agents -- Biological and Artificial Agents -- Designing for Emergence--Logic-Based and Embodied Systems -- Explaining Behavior -- Neural Networks for Adaptive Behavior -- From Biological to Artificial Neural Networks -- The Four or Five Basics -- Distributed Adaptive Control -- Types of Neural Networks -- Beyond Information Processing: A Polemic Digression -- Approaches and Agent Examples -- Braitenberg Vehicles -- Motivation -- The Fourteen Vehicles -- Segmentation of Behavior and the Extended Braitenberg Architecture -- The Subsumption Architecture -- Behavior-Based Robotics -- Designing a Subsumption-Based Robot -- Examples of Subsumption-Based Architectures -- Conclusions: The Subsumption Approach to Designing Intelligent Systems -- Artificial Evolution and Artificial Life. Abstract: "Researchers now agree that intelligence always manifests itself in behavior - thus it is behavior that we must understand. An exciting new field has grown around the study of behavior-based intelligence, also known as embodied cognitive science, "new AI," and "behavior-based AI."" "Rolf Pfeifer and Christian Scheier provide a systematic introduction to this new way of thinking about intelligence and computers. After discussing concepts and approaches such as subsumption architecture, Braitenberg vehicles, evolutionary robotics, artificial life, self-organization, and learning, the authors derive a set of principles and a coherent framework for the study of naturally and artificially intelligent systems, or autonomous agents. This framework is based on a synthetic methodology whose goal is understanding by designing and building."--Jacket The book includes all the background material required to understand the principles underlying intelligence, as well as enough detailed information on intelligent robotics and simulated agents so readers can begin experiments and projects on their own.By the mid-1980s researchers from artificial intelligence, computer science, brain and cognitive science, and psychology realized that the idea of computers as intelligent machines was inappropriate. The brain does not run'programs'; it does something entirely different. But what? Evolutionary theory says that the brain has evolved not to do mathematical proofs but to control our behavior, to ensure our survival. Researchers now agree that intelligence always manifests itself in behavior—thus it is behavior that we must understand. An exciting new field has grown around the study of behavior-based intelligence, also known as embodied cognitive science,'new AI,'and'behavior-based AI.'This book provides a systematic introduction to this new way of thinking. After discussing concepts and approaches such as subsumption architecture, Braitenberg vehicles, evolutionary robotics, artificial life, self-organization, and learning, the authors derive a set of principles and a coherent framework for the study of naturally and artificially intelligent systems, or autonomous agents. This framework is based on a synthetic methodology whose goal is understanding by designing and building.The book includes all the background material required to understand the principles underlying intelligence, as well as enough detailed information on intelligent robotics and simulated agents so readers can begin experiments and projects on their own. The reader is guided through a series of case studies that illustrate the design principles of embodied cognitive science.