CMSC 491M/691M - Spring 2003

Discussion Questions for Class #12, March 5

Reading: Brooks ("...representation," "...reason")

There are lots of interesting philosophical and conceptual issues raised by these papers, though they're not technically very deep. Here are just a few things we might want to talk about in class:

• The "representation" paper lists four key aspects of "Brooks-style" approaches: situatedness, embodiment, intelligence, and emergence. Are these issues inherently intertwined? Can they be studied in isolation?
• In Section 7.1 of the "...reason" paper, Brooks says "we believe representations are not necessary and appear only in the eye or mind of the beholder." If one believes that Brooks's approach is a good model of what goes on in the human brain, this implies that human brains do not have representations, but that we nonetheless perceive them to have representations. How can one perceive a representation if one doesn't have representations? Furthermore, much of our interaction with the world, at least with other intelligent agents (i.e., other people) is linguistic, which is inherently representational. What does a lack of representation mean for linguistic interfaces?
• Brooks says that "Most of what people do in their day to day lives is not problem-solving or planning, but rather it is routine activity in a relatively benign, but certainly dynamic, world." (...representation" p. 2) He uses this as an argument for working on these lower-level forms of intelligence. Yet one could argue that the "routine" activities are capable of being performed by all higher animals, and that it's exactly the problem-solving and planning activity that makes human intelligence unique. Do you think that systems that focus on lower-level intelligence will scale up to human-level or human-style intelligence? Why or why not?
• Brooks argues for a "bottom-up" view to designing autonomous robots. A counter-argument might go like this: Why start this bottom-up process with behaviors? Why not with neurons? Organic chemistry? Molecular biology? Quantum physics?
• Do you think that Brooks-style bottom-up design could someday "meet" McCarthy-style top-down design?