Chapter 4 Brief Survey of Cognitive Architectures
4.1 Introduction
While we believe CogPrime is the most thorough attempt at an architecture for advanced AGI, to date, we certainly recognize there have been many valuable attempts in the past with similar aims; and we also have great respect for other AGI efforts occurring in parallel with Cog- Prime development, based on alternative, sometimes overlapping, theoretical presuppositions and practical choices. In most of this book we will ignore these other current and historical efforts except where they are directly useful for CogPrime — there are many literature reviews already published, and this is a research treatise not a textbook. In this chapter, however, we will break from this pattern and give a rough high-level overview of the various AGI archi- tectures at play in the field today. The overview definitely has a bias toward other work with some direct relevance to CogPrime, but not an overwhelming bias; we also discuss a number of approaches that are unrelated to, and even in some cases conceptually orthogonal to, our own.
CogPrime builds on prior AI efforts in a variety of ways. Most of the specific algorithms and structures in CogPrime have their roots in prior AI work; and in addition, the CogPrime cognitive architecture has been heavily inspired by some other holistic cognitive architectures, especially (but not exclusively) MicroPsi [Bac09], LIDA [BF 09] and DeSTIN [ARK09a, ARCO9J. In this chapter we will briefly review some existing cognitive architectures, with especial but not exclusive emphasis on the latter three.
We will articulate some rough mappings between elements of these other architectures and elements of CogPrime — some in this chapter, and some in Chapter 5. However, these mappings will mostly be left informal and very incompletely specified. The articulation of detailed inter- architecture mappings is an important project, but would be a substantial additional project going well beyond the scope of this book. We will not give a thorough review of the similarities and differences between CogPrime and each of these architectures, but only mention some of the highlights.
The reader desiring a more thorough review of cognitive architectures is referred to Wlodek Duch’s review paper from the AGI-08 conference [DOPO8]; and also to Alexei Samsonovich’s review paper [Sam 10], which compares a number of cognitive architectures in terms of a feature checklist, and was created collaboratively with the creators of the architectures.
Dutch, in his survey of cognitive architectures [DOP08], divides existing approaches into three paradigms — symbolic, emergentist and hybrid — as broadly indicated in Figure 4.1. Drawing on his survey and updating slightly, we give here some key examples of each, and then explain why
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